Community making theatre making community

Declan Gorman’s play about seven decades of life in a Border town is an exercise in making art from real life and deploying symbolism with a purpose

HIS FIRST appearance is inauspicious and significant. An unwelcome trespasser who sneaks into an already suffering community, he brings nothing but bloody havoc while stoking suspicion. He is a fox.

Invading the chicken coop of a modest poultry farm just outside Castleblayney, Co Monaghan, his timing couldn’t be worse. It is the 1940s, towards the end of the second World War and as the farm’s recently widowed owner – the Protestant Elizabeth Eliot – comes to terms with her losses, a neighbour sees it in portentous terms: the chickens have been lined up like “war-time corpses”.

Eliot, the principal character in The Common People, an epic, sprawling drama of a community's history, written and directed by Declan Gorman, appears to dismiss such heavy symbolism, shooing away the notion of a "witch fox", a local shape-shifting legend, but even her earthly pragmatism wends towards greater significance. Determining to rebuild her farm, she extends her defiant break with the past into a plea for peace so that "the next generation doesn't have to suffer a war like the one's just ended".

Gorman’s subject, though, is not so much the final arrival of resolution (how could it be?) as how conflict is smuggled into times of accord, often dormant but never extinguished.

The structure of The Common Peopleis as wandering and warm as the folds of memory, constructed as a series of flashbacks during Eliot's 100th birthday celebrations. Spanning almost seven decades of life among Catholics and Protestants on the Border region, the piece was informed by the experience of locals both directly (there were 35 people in the cast) and indirectly, via field recordings conducted by Carmel Rudden among elderly locals at ceilidh house nights.

Originally from Monaghan, Gorman drew both from these recordings and workshops, but also from the voices of his own childhood.

Performed late in January, and delayed from its scheduled opening in December by, as Gorman put it, “the Big Snow”, the play that resulted could sometimes seem unwieldy. Its dialogue spread wide among relatives, neighbours and friends, its plot became embroidered with nostalgic detail, while its progression became conversely elliptical. Act Two, for instance, ends with the 1960s, before Act Three takes up the action in 2003 – as though the entire Troubles had been censored.

Omission may have been partly the point, though. The substance of the play was “an oral history” of south Ulster, and the participants of a big community theatre project, or a cosy ceilidh night, can be slow to talk about it, reluctant to pick at the scabs of history – preferring to apply the balm of safer stories. Weaving a fiction from real lives, the playwright had to stress commonalities but also to signal disturbance.

We hadn’t seen the last of that fox.

Community theatre, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, is a theatre of the people, by the people and for the people. As Eugene Van Erven wrote in Community Theatre: Global Perspectives, “it privileges the artistic pleasure and sociocultural empowerment of its community participants” while its material and forms “always emerge directly (if not exclusively) from ‘the’ community, whose interests it tries to express”.

Professional theatre makers, like Gorman, the former artistic director of Upstate, routinely work in community theatre, but the form is not intended to be professional itself. The Common Peoplemay have been about a community, but in the show's development, rehearsal, performance and reception, it essentially made one.

Of the 35 cast members, Gorman told a packed Iontas Arts Centre before showtime, were actors of many denominations and some of none. They had been drawn from Monaghan, Louth, Armagh and Down, and included non-nationals now resident in the region, and the cast ranged in age from eight to 80.

To the critic’s eye, the stage may have been at times a jumble of people, seven sitting with Ellen at a long top table on a raised dais, shoals of other guests at round tables below, switching roles and summoning scenes from the past with different levels of comfort. (At one point Gorman strode gamely onto the stage to substitute for an actor who had missed his cue.) But in the co-operation of makers, performers and audience, it was in effect a model community.

The tensions traced by Gorman’s narrative ranged from the religious (a villainous Catholic priest challenging Eliott’s two young sons in a mixed classroom to answer questions on the immaculate conception and transubstantiation) to the more overtly political (the hanging of an IRA man in the 1940s, a sectarian stand-off in a fleadh ceoil in the 1960s, community responses to mixed marriage, the murder of an RUC officer and the Civil Rights Movement), while the fox reappeared, with heavy portent, to kill a prized peacock.

“That’s nothing to do with us,” announces one character in the new century, “it’s all in the past.”

And as Polish migrant workers take jobs on the poultry farm, while new security systems attempt to keep any predatory metaphors at bay, a reminiscing ceilidh scene points to the uncertainty of creating a future: “Anyone got any recent stories?”

Funded by the European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation, which has supported cross-Border initiatives and the promotion of a shared society in Northern Ireland and the Border Region since 1994, the project comes at a time when such support, though still significant, is sharply diminishing.

From 1994 to 1999, funding for the programme stood at €500 million. It peaked from 2000-2004 at €531 million. Its latest programme, Peace III, has EU contributions of €225 million. The more mature the peace process becomes, it seems, the less support it receives. Perhaps that's why The Common Peopleends with an unexpected jolt to the audience about the need to be vigilant.

On the night of my viewing, packed with spectators generous with their applause, the performance was interrupted when Carmel Rudden, Castleblayney commonalities project administrator, arrived to the stage with a uniformed garda and asked if the owner of a particular vehicle in Iontas’s car park was in the audience. Its description matched my own. As officials prepared to evacuate the theatre, the event was quickly revealed to be a ruse – all part of the performance – and the car in question had been identified at random, right down to the licence plate – a statistical anomaly that still seems puzzling.

“I couldn’t have written it,” Gorman told me, between mutual apologies afterwards. In the show, this spell-breaking moment is a sobering reminder that a gag can contain the shiver of terror. In community theatre, making art from real life and deploying symbolism with a purpose, it was a reminder that some of us can still be easily foxed.