Strike!

Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin

The title carries a fist-pumping urgency, but writer/director Tracy Ryan’s play about the anti-apartheid shop workers strike of 1984 dramatises something more testing – the endurance of long struggle. Beginning with a picket on Dublin’s Henry Street, when a Dunnes Stores staff member refuses to sell South African fruit, that culminated almost three years later with a Government ban on South African imports, the play asks us to compare two prices: those we are willing to pay for principles and those we are willing to pay for oranges.

That may sound simplistic, and there is a similar tendency in the play to reduce political and commercial complexity into stock figures where a stand-off between Management and The Workers resembles a piece of trade union pageantry. The workers are stoic, salty and self-sacrificing. Management seem to spend their board meetings cackling over fruit bowls, while unsupportive clergy swill brandy, the middle-classes eat cheese, and politicians simply dither.

Ryan is reluctant to draw focus to any individuals on the picket (we do see one striker lose her home and another worker cross the picket, but the group, we understand, is the hero). Along the way political consciousness is stoked by international support, an audience with Desmond Tutu, and sage words from a South African exile. But all of this is to make the play serve as a well-meaning tribute, rather than a drama (is anyone here really rooting for apartheid?) and some fascinating archive material of anti-apartheid posters or documentary images on the rear cyclorama suggest that the material would make for a better documentary.

As director, Ryan anticipates the problem and often tries to invigorate the stage with motion: a galvanising speech from Uché Gabriel Akujobi’s South African exile prompts a stylised march; while the recording of a charity single with Bono is interspersed with an undermining interview given by a trade unionist.

Such verve helps to alleviate the production’s face-front earnestness. But while those who took a stand are certainly worth celebrating, it’s hard to decide whether their example here is meant to inspire or admonish. Some ideals and actions, it shows, can lead to positive change over time. Other hopes, it suggests, can be wildly misplaced: “He’s new,” says one striker of a young political tyro named Brian Cowan. “He might be good.”

Runs until Nov 6