Identity politics follows Ireland across the waters
A MAN looks at a newborn baby girl and discovers the face of Gerry Adams staring back at him. No, it’s not Sinn Féin’s latest election gambit. It’s the absurd premise of David Ireland’s new play, Cyprus Avenue, which opens at the Peacock Theatre this week before transferring to London’s Royal Court next month.
The play’s vaguely Kafkaesque premise is typical of Ireland, a young Belfast dramatist who has distinguished himself in recent years with plays that blend graphic, often disturbing narratives to provocative, sometimes nightmarish imagery.
In Cyprus Avenue, the man who finds Gerry Adams’s mug beaming back at him is Eric Miller (Stephen Rea), a veteran Ulster loyalist who — bemused by the vagaries of life in modern Belfast — recounts his woes to a therapist.
Having been commissioned by the Abbey Theatre, Ireland began writing the part specifically with Rea in mind in 2012, even though at that point he had never met the iconic actor. When, by coincidence, Rea approached Ireland to commission an earlier play for his own company, Field Day, in 2013, Ireland revealed to Rea that he was currently writing a play with him in mind.
“Even then, I never thought that he would do it, or that the stars would align,” says Ireland. “So it was very exciting when he said he was available and interested.”
The play brings to the fire Rea’s gifts for comedy, says Ireland.
“In some quarters, Stephen isn’t really seen as a comedy actor, because he has done a lot of very prominent dramatic and serious roles,” he says. “But he’s really very funny. He’ll hate me saying that because then when people come to the show, they will expect him to be hilarious. But I think he’s really funny.”
Hailing from a Protestant family in the east Belfast estate of Ballybeen, Ireland has spent much of his professional life in Scotland, working both as an actor and a writer. His success in the latter department saw him enjoy a stint as the Lyric Theatre’s first writer-in-residence in Belfast in 2012, and he is regarded as one of the most significant new theatre voices to have emerged from the North in recent years. Nevertheless, he currently lives in Scotland with his wife and young family. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that a great deal of his plays centre on issues of community identity and what it means for the individual.
“When I got commissioned by the Abbey to write Cyprus Avenue, I was very aware that I was being commissioned by the national theatre of Ireland at the same time that I was moving to Scotland, and also aware that I’d never really felt particularly Irish,” he says. “So it made me question what Irish identity mean to me. So Cyprus Avenue is a play about loyalist identity, but it’s about questions of Irishness within loyalist identity and loyalism’s relationship with Irishness.”
Although previous plays such as Can’t Forget About You and Everything Between Us have explicitly dealt with the aftermath of the Troubles, Ireland is all too aware of the danger “that people think you’re speaking for a community or that you’re speaking for loyalism or unionism — but I’m only ever speaking for myself and my own feelings”.
Just the same, while his plays may attend to the fate of the individual in the grip of complex identity politics, often doing so very viscerally, Ireland acknowledges how deeply his own thoughts and feelings are also inevitably informed by his own historical situation.
“People say to me all the time ‘why don’t you write about something other than the Troubles?’ And I say ‘I can’t escape it’. I grew up in it. It obsesses me. And I was affected by it. And I need to talk about it.”
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