(Roy Garland, Irish News)

Last week I went to the premier of the Dubbel Joint theatre company's In a Cold House written by former republican prisoners Laurence McKeown and Brian Campbell and staged in west Belfast with actors Vincent Higgins, Susie Kelly and William Hoyland.

The first play I saw at the Whiterock theatre was Dubbel Joint's Forced Upon Us in 1999.

This was set in the 1920s and depicted notorious activities of loyalists like District Inspector Nixon of the RUC. I felt that that play reflected an over-reliance on stereotypical images of Catholics as victims and Protestants/security forces as perpetrators.

The Catholics consisted mainly of victimised women whereas Protestants were seen as aggressive male victimisers.

Yet the stereotype was not total and a Protestant shipyard worker with a social conscience was depicted, as was a Catholic father who dismissed the romanticism of war against the Brits. My main criticism of Forced Upon Us was that it reinforced rather than challenged myths within the nationalist community. It wasn't the accuracy of the portrayal I questioned. Perception is always partially self-generated and is to an extent mythical but for this very reason orthodoxies have to be challenged.

I suggested that Forced Upon Us should be presented on the Shankill while an entirely different play was needed for the Falls.

We have to move beyond our stultifying and mutually exclusive communities because, although communities are in some respects priceless commodities, they always come with a price tag that can be too high.

In contrast to Forced Upon Us, I read that In a Cold House went "to the heart of our difficulties" and challenged "both republicans and unionists alike".

If it was being portrayed in these terms this represented progress and I was eager to see if the show matched these fine words. After seeing the play I concluded that, on balance, it did.

Not that stereotyping was absent. The ex-cop and his wife came across as average middle-class Protestants whereas the ex-republican prisoner plumber was ipso facto working class. The ex-policeman's wife came closest to being a mediator but working class loyalists didn't feature at all.

The retired policeman and his wife were contemplating a move to England having become fed up with the daily round of checking under the car and varying travel routines. The plumber was working for a traditionally unionist firm now employing Catholics. The ex-cop quickly became suspicious about the plumber's tribal identity and managed to verify that he was a republican ex-prisoner and one who had killed the husband of a close friend. Gradually everything tumbled out and the atmosphere became extremely heated.

Both sides in this small society of three displayed the mutual incomprehension that haunts this society. The writers made no attempts to explain wider aspects of the conflict and the three people in the kitchen represented estranged neighbours who found it impossible to understand the perspectives of the other side. They just couldn't appreciate why people had done what they had done – like joining the RUC or the IRA. In our communities we are not dealing with forces fairly remote from our existence – like the IRA or British army – but rather with neighbours estranged by generations of mistrust and pain who now have got to make space for each other. The play illustrated how painful this can be. Some time ago I witnessed a similar real life confrontation with ex-security force people meeting nationalists for the first time.

The stories of the ex-UDR/RUC men were heart-rending. When a nationalist identified himself as a republican this sent shivers up the spines of the former security force people. Yet the dialogue was deeply moving and most of those listening found the experience extremely difficult. In this situation there can be no cheap grace and no easy reconciliation.

The play didn't have an ending and one imagines the dialogue continuing if and when the plumber, as suggested by the ex-cop's wife, actually meets the wife of the policeman he killed.

The play does what I think a play should do – stimulate thought and hopefully move us to action. As one friend put it, we need to do unexpected things because it is only the unexpected that breaks the logjam. The ex-policeman's wife did the unexpected thing when she made tea for all three and they hesitantly sat down together.

This article appeared first in the June 9, 2003 edition of the Irish News.

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