Susan McKayassesses the lasting legacy of Stewart Parker's work.
'IN ANY PLAY," wrote Stewart Parker, "ancestral voices prophesy and bicker, and the ghosts of your own time and birthplace wrestle and dance". The "ancestral wraiths at my elbow", he continued, included "the usual Belfast motley crew" who had bequeathed to him "two islands (the 'British Isles'), two Irelands, two Ulsters, two men fighting over a field".He wrote that in 1988, shortly before his death, aged just 47. A weirdly appropriate typographical error in his collected works has him writing it in 1989, a ghost himself.
According to Stephen Rea, the actor for whom Stewart Parker wrote some of his finest roles, Parker wrote from the perspective of one "poised between identities". His plays, he says, have become more important in the years since they were written. "And that is the test of a play. Stewart was a great chronicler of his times, and he was a prophet." Parker died just a year after his magnificent last play, Pentecost, was performed by Field Day in Derry's Guildhall, with Rea in the role of Lenny, which was written for him. His first major play for the stage, the delightful Spokesong was rejected by the Lyric in his native city in 1975. He was, friends say, terribly hurt. It went on to have its first performance in Dublin in 1975, before triumphant runs in the West End and on Broadway.
This week in Belfast, Rough Magic opens two new productions of these bookends of Parker's career, in conjunction with the Lyric, which has already, to some degree, made amends, with a fine production of Parker's Northern Star in 1984. That play, with its dazzling parodies of authors including Sheridan, Synge and Beckett, concerned, among other things, the last days of Henry Joy McCracken, and the meaning of history.
"There are a lot of ghosts in Stewart's plays," says Rea. "He sees us in Northern Ireland always grappling with ghosts. I've missed him for years. I've no idea what he would make of now. In Pentecost, he prefigures the peace. He rejects politics but shows that somehow people have to reach out to each other. There is an aspiration to reconciliation." Parker noted that "plays and ghosts have a lot in common. The energy which flows from some intense moment of conflict in a particular time and place seems to activate them both". The intense moment for Pentecost is the Ulster Workers' Strike of 1974, when armed and masked loyalists, supported by Ian Paisley and many "respectable" unionists, used intimidation and thuggery to collapse the new powersharing administration at Stormont.
The play was written in the year of the Enniskillen bomb. Rea wrote in 1999 that for a writer to "imagine the possibility of a future at all" in relation to those dark days was a memorable achievement. The late Mary Holland wrote in 1995, when Rough Magic last produced Pentecost, that back in 1987, "it was difficult, frankly, to share the author's optimism". However, a year after the paramilitary ceasefires, "how we are confounded by the artist's prophetic voice!"
The Stewart Parker Trust, directed by John Fairleigh, will today announce the winner of an annual bursary for an emerging young playwright. "I don't think he has influenced that many people," he says. "But when younger playwrights see his work, they are amazed." Fairleigh laments that many young contemporary writers are preoccupied with characters who "fall off barstools" instead of, like Parker, writing about ideas and "people talking to each other".
The director of the plays is Lynne Parker, the playwright's niece. "Spokesong is like Brecht, Pentecost is like Chekhov," she says. "Spokesong has a green politics that has huge resonance today. Pentecost is as universal and enduring as Vanya or Lear." Both were prescient, she says, and both contain a timely warning. "If you don't deal with the past and deal with pain and loss, it will go underground and re-emerge." There is sweet reason in people, and there is depravity. Neither can be ignored.
A remarkable resurgence of interest in Parker is afoot. American academic, Marilynn Richtarik, who is writing a biography of the playwright, is one of the speakers lined up for a conference called Parker - the Northern Star at Queen's University this October. Conference organiser, lecturer Mark Phelan, agrees that Parker's work has not been given its rightful place in the Irish theatrical canon. Along with his stage plays, there is a body of vibrant and groundbreaking television drama, including Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, Catchpenny Twist, and The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner. A book of Parker's rock columns, published in The Irish Times, is imminent. Poet and academic Gerard Dawe, who along with Maria Johnstone edited it, says: "His voice is sharp and fresh and ironic."
If Parker has been neglected, there are hopeful signs that the healing has begun.
