In “Theses on the Philosophy of History” from his Illuminations, Walter Benjamin writes, “Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger.” [1]  Yet in Belfast, Northern Ireland images from the past and present history are literally etched onto the urban landscape.  Sectarian divides are marked by curbs painted in the colors of the flag of the nation to which a given community pledges allegiance and wall murals invoke static histories of community triumphs and oppressions.  Fights are waged over stretches of road down which one community wishes to march and which another claims as its own.  Political and (para) military battles are fought over space—who gets it and who controls it.  While the marking of a geo-political landscape can offer protection for the inhabitants within the closed community from the larger political apparatus, this barricade culture arguably prohibits any sustained interrogation of the contradictions within the movement, relying instead on essentialist definitions of identity and political allegiance.

This essay is concerned with the particularities of space in inner city Belfast, and arguably, that which is most germane to my analysis – the space itself, is that which cannot be fully demonstrated or articulated in any written form.  To know who you are in Belfast is to know with a fair degree of certainty where you are.  According to a 2002 survey, carried out among 4,800 households in 12 housing estates separated by Peace Lines, 68% of Belfast 18-25 year olds stated that they had never had a meaningful conversation with someone from another community, and over 60% stated that relationships between both communities had become worse since the 1994 ceasefires.  Another survey of 40,000 jobs revealed that less than 8% of Protestants held jobs in Catholic areas and less than 5% of Catholics held jobs in Protestant areas.  Approximately 93% of elementary and primary schools are segregated according to religious difference. [2]  With white Christians representing over 99% of the population, and approximately 70% of them living in areas more than 90% Protestant or Catholic, [3] Belfast remains a patchwork of well defined, nearly homogenous enclaves. As the old saying goes, to know your address is to know “what foot you kick with.”

Given Belfast’s location as the prime staging area for much of the troubles [4], any forward looking economic plan for its urban regeneration must consider the careful navigation of its political past, which invariably means uneasy negotiation of the very space of the city. Yet in recent years, buoyed by the Celtic Tiger economy in the Republic [5], the (tenuous) peace agreement and a sustained international fascination with a romantically imagined troubles, Belfast’s inner city has witnessed a flourishing “troubles industry”: blackcab tours, walkabouts, and, most recently, site specific theatre. Economic regeneration and development has led to the growth of a vibrant city centre so popular that in 2005 Belfast was the voted the third most popular UK city for a weekend getaway, behind London and Glasgow.  The title of New York Times journalist Stuart Emmrich’s travel profile on Belfast perhaps best articulates this new confidence: “Belfast is Ready for the Party to Begin.”[6]

The Wedding Community Play was a collaborative, site specific theatre project that ultimately involved over 90 people and was over 15 months in the making.  The project began in September of 1998 when six Belfast community theatre groups [8]  from across sectarian lines met to develop a play for the 2000 Belfast festival, based on an idea by producer Jo Egan. In March of the following year the six groups went away for a weekend retreat to Lisnaskea, county Fermanagh to devise the play based largely on their own experiences and that of their communities.  The groups decided to create a play about the cross community marriage of a Protestant woman and a Catholic man, and comically explore the prejudices, challenges and implications a union might make possible for the characters, their families, and the greater Belfast audience. The theatre groups worked with professional playwrights Marie Jones and Martin Lynch, who formally crafted the play from the improvised material originating from the workshops.[9]

It was not the first time that community theatre groups had come together to create theatre in Belfast, nor was it the first time that community theatre groups had worked together with a professional playwright.  As community theatre historian David Grant notes, cross communal theatre had been going on in Belfast to some degree since the 1970s.[10]  Yet The Wedding Community Play was significant for the choice in staging the play in various locations around east Belfast.  The production required that audience members navigate their way through the Short Strand area of east Belfast to first the Catholic groom’s house, then on to the Protestant bride’s house on Templemore Avenue, then to the church in the city centre for the ceremony, and finally heading to a pub along the banks of the Lagan River for the reception.  For many members of the cast and crew, as well as the audience, the journey into Catholic and Protestant homes in the Short Strand was the first time they had ever entered the homes and neighborhoods of the other political community, despite their proximity.

The production not only cast the city as a particular theatrical landscape, but used theatre to suggest the possibility of re-mapping the political geography of the city to allow for contrapuntal discussions of identity politics, religion, and cross communal marriage in Northern Ireland.  Of primary importance in the production was the interrogation of the urban landscape—the stubborn intractability of Belfast’s inner city, with closed off streets, military curfews and barricades, political murals and omnipresent military surveillance.  As the political impositions on geography have enforced cultural and social discrimination, despite the much hallowed Peace Agreement and ceasefires, physical penetration of socially segregated communities could illustrate the potential for radical rapproachment and dialogue.

It is important to note how this theatre piece differed in function from the black cab tours. Black cab tours might wind their way past painted gables and political murals, playing upon outsiders’ fascination with the animated urban space, but their function is to render the kinetic neighborhoods of east and west Belfast as ironically static.  Driving through the various trouble spots, with sites of beatings, killings, and protests acknowledged by a commemorative mural, plaque, or the driver just pointing it out, the passenger’s relationship to the charged space is oddly neutralized.  The seductive nature of safety provided by the black cabs--the only cars that would drive through these neighborhoods in the 70s and 80s, relies on the passenger’s viewing the space as static.  Arguably the tourists who pay $20 to drive through these neighborhoods would never walk through them after dark, the voyeuristic frame having been taken away, and the space becoming fearful, alive, fluid, and unpredictable. And certainly statistics support the assertion that the neighborhood is not without violence. While the number of murders has dropped dramatically since the ceasefires, the number of “lesser” acts of violence such as fistfights, intimidation, and physical or verbal abuse have increased. [11]

The Wedding Community Play forced audience members into homes—into kitchens and bedrooms of east Belfast Catholics and Protestants, to consider not the public, mediatized space of troubles violence, but the private, domestic sphere from where prejudice may come, and acknowledge that middle class racism shares a legacy of hate with the bomb throwing defenders of Edward Carson’s Army or the IRA.

Before discussing the production I would like to provide some information regarding the development of the piece.  The workshops at Linaskea were primarily designed to provide a safe space for different people to voice their concerns and beliefs about sectarianism, representation and identity.  During candid talks about growing up in Belfast during the troubles, participants shared memories.  On the subject of whether any of the participants had ever dated anyone of another religion, the remarks were telling:

. . . When I asked him why [he was ending the relationship], he said “cos my mates all know you’re a Catholic and I’m in the Orange Order and I’ll be put out of the Orange Order and they’ll tell.” And I just went, “Jesus, to think I was actually going against my father here,” because my da used to say, “I can smell them.” (Mary O’Connor, Stone Chair Community Theatre)

. . . He was a really nice person, I went with him for some time but I lived in the heart of the Shankill and he used to insist on walking me home to the door, he had no car, and I’d come in and my dad would say, “Has that wee fella walked you home to the door again?” And I’d say “Yes Daddy.” “Where is he now?” “He’s walking alone out on the street.” “I’ve told you repeatedly, that I wouldn’t live with myself if that wee fella was walking away from here and gets beat up.” So my da would go running after him, go up to the garage, get the car out and run him home.  (Renee Greig, Shankill Community Theatre) [12]

Joe McDowall, in an interview with Claire Cochrane, explained the oftentimes difficult process involved:

The devising process was very scary sometimes—the thing that sticks out in my mind was a time the writers and directors put us in our groups, Protestant and Catholics, and then made us say the worst things we could say about each other.  It wasn’t embarrassing, but it was really scary.  To hear what they were saying as well—it was like, is that what they really think of us? [13]

The workshop principles and methods evolved through an adaptation of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed literacy methods and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques developed within and beyond Brazil.  Using Freire as a model, one might consider the workshops as structured around three aims:  1) to prioritize the life experience, the living needs, and the knowledge of the participants.  2) to structure the workshops in a dialogue between the needs of the participants and the cultural aims of the coordinators,  and 3) to build a workshop culture of intimacy, supported risk and democratic participation.  These principles were implemented through phases: informal storytelling and discussion, experimentation and critical questioning, improvisations, and production.

Producer Jo Egan remarked on the delicate nature of the workshops, “When we were holding the workshops, a vital part of the community theatre process, we were asking everyone, ourselves, to go down deep and examine [themselves]. We also ensured that we carried out our research in the communities to help them understand what we were trying to achieve.  We didn’t want to be seen as just parachuting in.” [14]

Issues of casting arose and it was suggested that cross community casting be tried, with Catholics playing the roles of Protestant characters and Protestants playing Catholic characters.  This idea was initially supported, but after a number of improvisations, people expressed their unease with largely superficial representational performance styles.  Eventually some Catholics played Protestants and vice versa, but not as a general rule.

Particularly with regard to cross community casting, the issue of personal safety was raised by more than one participant.  At all stages of the project’s development, members of different paramilitary organizations were kept informed of the production’s aims.  The project coordinators prior to the workshops approached members of paramilitary groups because, as Ballybeen theatre company member Maureen Harkins explained, “There are certain things that you don’t do in Belfast without doing something else first.” [15]  Such trepidation was hardly an exaggerated response from the communities.  In 1989 the Derry Frontline theatre company wrote and produced Time Will Tell, which included the character of a republican lesbian.  For suggesting that an extreme republican organization might have any lesbian members, the theatre company and the actress playing the role suffered the wrath of the IRA.  The lesbian character was recast three times after the first two actresses backed out--the IRA had burned down their homes. The third actress was afforded round the clock protection and a strategy was put in place to take her across the border after the production was over. [16]

Admittedly, The Wedding Community Play project did not take nearly the theatrical risks that Derry Frontline’s production took. Sectarian concerns expressed by the characters are largely overshadowed by more generic concerns over the ballooning cost of the nuptial celebrations, the color of bridesmaid’s dresses, and the guest list. Perhaps not surprisingly, the production did not engender a hostile reception from either republican or loyalist organizations. The producers and actors received agreements from the paramilitaries and the production was able to continue.

The group chose the neighborhood of Short Strand for the play.  The Short Strand is a working class Catholic enclave within the overwhelmingly Protestant district of east Belfast.  The thirty plus foot high barbed wire Peace wall, one of twenty such structures in Belfast dating from the early 1970s through the present that separates Catholics from their Protestant neighbors.  The peace lines snake their way through the city, cutting off homes, neighborhoods and streets.  The two houses chosen for the production were situated two blocks apart, on either side of the peace line. [17] Each house was to be outfitted with comparable furnishings and appliances, so as not to detract audience attention from the scripted dialogue going on in different rooms in the houses.  The difficulty in transporting busloads of people through neighborhoods in Belfast speaks not only to the sustained segregation that both political communities enforce, but the ambition necessary in trying to bridge the divide.  Harkins explained, “Short Strand is such a small Catholic community that [Catholic] men would come and go from the area in a certain way just to avoid the risk of passing into the Protestant area.” [18]

The company agreed that the bride and groom, Nicola and Damian, would never have met in their respective neighborhoods, but in a neutral space.  It was decided that a line would be worked into the play explaining that they met at a U2 concert, most likely the famous 1998 concert at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall where lead singer Bono escorted David Trimble and John Hume, leaders of the unionist and nationalist parties in Northern Ireland, onstage for a photo opportunity to drum up youth support for the Good Friday Agreement.  It was the first time Trimble and Hume had made a joint appearance since April, when they and six other party leaders struck a compromise accord on how Northern Ireland should be governed.  The photo ran on the front pages of the international papers for days. [19]

Such was the novelty of a site specific, interactive theatre in Short Strand that the production attracted a significant amount of newspaper and television coverage and was the first play to sell out for the 1999 theatre festival.  In an instance of theatrical and political choreography that no one could have anticipated, throughout the run of the play the United Ulster Party was debating their vote to accept or reject the limitations and demands of a devolved government and power sharing executive in Northern Ireland.  On the last day of the production, the UUP was set to deliver its vote.  Existing as a micro conversation of the larger political discourse going on at Parliament, journalists and pundits were eager to place the Wedding Community Play within the developing political discourse. Marie Jones and Martin Lynch were interviewed by the BBC days before the opening performance: