Fintan O'Toole reviews Peacefire at the Helix in Dublin.
The great silence of the Northern Ireland conflict surrounds the "touts" and "hoods". The kids from broken homes, mired in poverty and belonging neither to the state nor to the paramilitaries, have often been the victims nobody claims. The joyriders shot as they raced through army checkpoints or kneecapped by the IRA are the ill-regarded jetsam of the conflict, too unheroic to feature on anyone's agenda.
Macdara Vallely's brave and brilliant performance of Peacefire, his one-man play, gives an eloquent voice to this silence. Funny, fierce and infinitely sad, it neither patronises nor glorifies Collie, the Craigavon joyrider and "ten-quid tout" whose story it tells with a directness and simplicity that
disguise the artfulness of Vallely's approach.
The elements of the play are unfussy. A triptych suggestive of stained-glass windows and thus of a church. A plastic chair. A bottle of Buckfast rotgut wine. A soundtrack (by Brendan Dolan) that fades between an electronic beat and snatches of radio reports on the IRA ceasefire, the Greysteel massacre and punishment shootings. And Collie in a hideous shell suit and a bad haircut, a nobody from the nowheres that lie on the edges of every European city.
The artfulness lies in this minimal approach. Vallely knows there is more than enough violence and strangeness and epic emotion in the tale he has to tell. Collie is a quiet, awkward kid whose da was shot dead in a republican feud and whose ma's nerves have been at her ever since. The one touch of class in his life is supplied by a legendary joyrider whose allure proves irresistible. Vallely is superb on both the mechanics and the mythology of joyriding, the way it transforms apparently dumb kids into awesomely skilled experts, the way it offers both literal and metaphorical escape from meaningless lives.
Vallely's artfulness lies, too, in his refusal to wallow in misery. Peacefire is not another Northern Irish Stations of the Cross. It is not an exercise in self-pity but a critique of masochism. It plays on the irony that Collie ends up as a victim because he wants to escape victimhood but lacks the means to do so. There is, too, a real political intelligence at work. Vallely has the courage not to be evasive. Much of the discourse around punishment beatings and shootings has tended to suggest that what's really wrong with them is that people who are alleged to be informers aren't really guilty. Vallely refuses to engage in this kind of moral evasion. Collie is a tout. And he tells us why he is a tout: the IRA, in his world, are not rebels but authority figures.
In its own quiet way, indeed, Peacefire gives an utterly devastating picture of the Provos. From Collie's perspective they are neither good nor evil, just another bit of mundane squalor. His is a world in which an uneducated kid can talk knowledgeably about the impact that different calibres of bullet have on the body and in which a Catholic tearaway can ask the local heavy, as a favour, to make sure to shoot him with a .45. Viciousness has been so normalised that kids deemed guilty of antisocial behaviour make appointments with the Provos to have their knee jobs done, so the ambulances can be ordered in advance.
This surreal reality is superbly realised in Vallely's performance. He talks quietly, sometimes even indistinctly, not just because that is the way Collie would talk but also because the drama of his story lies precisely in the fact that it is not seen as dramatic. Collie is a lump of dirt that his world scrapes off its shoe. Vallely tells us, with grace and art, what that feels like. Peacefire finishes its short run at the Helix tonight: it deserves to be packed out.
Ends today.
