November 2, 2008 marked the 20th anniversary of the death of playwright Stewart Parker. To commemorate the life and work of Belfast’s most visionary playwright, Queen’s Drama Department, in association with the Institute of Irish Studies, hosted the first major international conference evaluating Parker’s extraordinary artistic achievement.

In addition to this, and in close association with the Stewart Parker Trust, the Belfast Festival and the BBC, an exciting retrospective of Parker’s work was also hosted by Queen’s Drama Department, compiled and organised by lecturer in drama studies, Dr Mark Phelan. This comprised several rehearsed readings, film screenings, photographic displays, and the publication of three books of Parker’s work. In his work for radio, stage, and screen - as well as his poetry, journalism and criticism - Parker’s politics and aesthetics were extraordinary for their pluralism and prescience.

Here, Culture Northern Ireland reproduce programme notes of selected Parker plays, radio plays, screen plays and collected writings, written by academics and theatre practitioners, from the accompanying Queen’s Drama Department brochure.

Radio Pictures was originally transmitted on July 16, 1985 on the BBC. In this screenplay Parker pays a playfully bittersweet tribute to radio drama, for which he wrote extensively during his apprentice years. The play takes place in a studio during the recording of a radio play, Mr Deadman and Miss Goodbody, which narrates the ambiguous relationship between an ageing peeping Tom and his young victim. Throughout the play, Parker reveals the (not-so-)wonderful world of radio drama with its cheap and hilarious home-made sound effects and its disgruntled actors who alleviate the boredom knitting and gossiping between the takes.

Susanna, who plays Miss Goodbody, complains she can’t play a character who is ‘all body language’ on the radio and later admits that she only accepted the role to make money. Bryce, the narrow-minded director, is in a hurry to finish and when the author, Rory Colquhon, expresses his disappointment at Bryce’s ill-advised directorial decisions, you can hear Parker raging against bad productions of his own plays. Indeed, such dissatisfaction led him to withdraw his name from the credits of a television film Eat the Peach the year after. Beyond this satirical sideswipe at radio drama, Radio Pictures deals with the role of the artist in a society torn apart by violence. Colquhon insists that his play, Mr Deadman and Miss Goodbody, is an allegory. Deadman fantasizes on Miss Goodbody from a distance, but avoids meeting her: ‘He wants a truth that remains in his control. A pure object of desire’.

Inner play and outer play absorb each other, as it appears that Colquhon actually behaves just like Deadman. Although he maintains that he is devastated to witness Northern Ireland sliding into chaos, he simply doesn’t feel concerned.

He argues that artists need to escape from the world of matter and take refuge in an imaginative world, as he explains to Susanna: ‘the imagination is something else, it goes its own way, it has to be let do that, even when the city’s burning’. But the actress challenges this poetic license, emphasizing the obscenity of his claim. Colquhon is a voyeur, and his words are useless. Once again, Parker insists on the responsibility of the playwright to his own place and people, emphasizing the power of drama to inspire and offer alternatives when the city’s burning.

Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain was broadcast on BBC1 on November 24, 1981 as part of the well-known Play for Today series. The script was published in full in Irish Studies Review in 1998, edited and introduced by Marilynn Richtarik.

Richtarik provides a detailed account of the genesis and development of the project. Parker was initially invited by BBC producer June Roberts to contribute something to the Play for Today series in 1979. As Richtarik explains, the idea for the play derived in part from a story told to Parker by a friend and later acquired a Joycean framework.

Parker later was to refer to the play as ‘a condensed female variant on the Dedalus-Bloom odyssey’. It is an odyssey that takes place in Belfast, and this gave rise to some conflict when the proposed director, Stephen Frears, wanted a much more explicit story of the Troubles. Ultimately, no agreement was reached and production was delayed while a new director was sought. Life in Belfast is evoked visually in the play: Iris trudging along near City Hall; Ruby driving past red-brick terraces; Iris being searched by a security guard as she enters a department store; Ruby’s car being checked by the police. Military vehicles and soldiers frequently stray into the frame. But these deliberately remain peripheral to the narrative core, even though they bear upon it. As Parker put it in a letter to Frears: ‘The soldiers, the bombs, the political rhetoric, they take for granted, they’ve lived with it forever, it’s like the traffic and the rain’.

In the foreground are the social problems that plague the city’s working-class inhabitants, and the callous responses to these problems from the middle classes. A certain restless agitation governs most of the play’s characters, and the aggressive strains of Stiff Little Fingers sets the tone for Ruby’s odyssey through Belfast. By the play’s conclusion, a trio of responses to the conditions of Belfast life has emerged: the loss of sanity; emigration; or staying on and surviving together.

Strikingly, it is the female characters that seem most rooted in the city. Fleeing the chilly middle-class restraint of her mother’s ‘well-appointed’ semi-detached house, Ruby finds warmth and friendship in Joyce’s home. Running discreetly beneath the social themes is a somewhat ironic reference to Ulysses. Ruby the Bloom figure, played by Frances Tomelty, is a vigorous if flu-sodden social worker who journeys the city sneezing and assisting others. Iris the Stephen figure, played by Aingeal Grehan, is a rather passive, incurious character who is regularly and haphazardly caught up in others’ activities. Other connections with Ulysses are suggested by the setting of various scenes, in an office, a pub, a hospital and finally the house where the two protagonists meet in the evening. Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain is an unlikely combination of elements. Yet the discreet Joyce reference, the punk gig, and the soundtrack, lend unexpected nuances to the social problem play structure that was emblematic of Play for Today.

The closing shots of the cramped living-room full of children and women talking and drinking tea intercuts with the patrolling police car in the darkened, decrepit street outside, to provide an atypical, but characteristically optimistic, image of Belfast life brimming with communal life, generosity and trust.

Set in a crumbling cottage on the slopes of Cave Hill in the aftermath of the 1798 Rising, Northern Star, is an Irish ‘history play’ like no other. As the Troubles’ relentless cycle of killings continued throughout the 1980s, ‘playing out the same demented comedy of terrors from generation to generation’, Parker turned to the ‘malignant legends’ of history in which the north was trapped.

His play returns to the ‘Golden Age’ of late 18th century Belfast, when the city had been a harbinger of radical thought; hailed as the ‘Athens of the North’: an appellation appropriately given in 1793 at the opening of the new Theatre Royal in Arthur Street.

Parker was fascinated by marginal figures like Henry Joy McCracken and Jemmy Hope rather than the more established dramatis personae of the United Irishmen. Moreover, the complex facts and fates of these ‘minor’ men, allowed him to challenge loyalist and nationalist notions of the past: to reveal how the origins of militant republicanism - in one of those ironies of Irish history - lay in the same protestant community that inveighed against its modern (murderous) manifestation.

As Marilynn Richtarik observes, in Northern Star, Parker sought to articulate ‘a creative space between unionism and nationalism’ to prove ‘the possibility of a shared culture in Northern Ireland’. An objective that was as audacious as it was utopian, and which he continued to explore, in a more lyrical register, in Pentecost.

Northern Star is a masterpiece of modern Irish drama. A play that both contains - and critiques - the Irish theatrical canon. In his own words, Parker wrote the play as a play-full ‘pastiche’. Stylistically, it ventriloquises the speech, setting, and style of several Irish playwrights from Sheridan to Beckett, whilst structurally, the play is shaped according to the ‘Seven Ages of Man’, derived from the famous speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in which Jacque meditates on the closeness of relationships between the stage and life; the motif of theatrum mundi:

‘All the world’s a stage
And all the men and women merely players
They have their exits and their entrances
And one man in his time plays many parts
His acts being seven ages.’

These lines are uttered by Henry Joy McCracken who spends the play vainly attempting to rehearse his speech for his performance on the political stage of the scaffold. Theatrum mundi meets Belfast’s gallows humour. The play opens with the first age: that of innocence (Sheridan); the proceeds to the second age, idealism (Boucicault); followed by cleverness; didactics; compromise; heroism; knowledge, each written in the distinct and distinctive style of different playwrights.

This meta-theatrical structure isn’t simply for the sake of it; so that smug aficionados can congratulate themselves on their superior knowledge of the canon. It hardwires the very meaning of the play. For example, the opening (st)age of innocence aptly labels the naïveté of Belfast’s urban(e) intellectual classes who believed those lofty French ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité could be transplanted to Ireland where they could transcend territorial and tribal divisions (‘We were city boys. What did we know about two men fighting over a field,’ say McCracken to Jemmy Hope).

By the age of knowledge, however, those sublime principles have been drowned in sectarian slaughter and military massacre. Thus, context and content are thematically connected. But, there’s more. The age of knowledge plays out in prison and is written in the style of Behan, (with explicit references to The Quare Fellow’s setting and dialogue).

Moreover, Behan was the first republican playwright since Pearse to have been imprisoned for his political beliefs, and whilst incarcerated, Behan reflected upon and recanted his revolutionary convictions; rejecting its doctrinaire beliefs as dangerous dogma. A journey shared by McCracken in Parker’s play. Political history, theatrical tradition, personal biography, and the canon of Irish drama are thus compressed in Northern Star’s complex cat’s cradle of politics, historiography, and art.

But such academic arabesques are besides the point. The play’s allusiveness and ingenious structure pose no barriers to understanding or enjoying it. Northern Star’s frenetic theatricality, witty dialogue, visual spectacle, and compelling ideas and arguments will provide any paying punter with, what the late great John McGrath called, ‘a good night out’. And it also provides ‘a good night in’ every time one gets a chance to re-read this extraordinary play at home.

‘Will yiz stop fighting’: James Young’s affectionate-cum-exasperated catchphrase fell on deaf ears during the darkest years of the Troubles. But Jimmy should count himself lucky he didn’t work in the nineteenth century like his comic predecessor, Johnny Patterson, ‘the singing clown’.

When a chaotic performance of his celebrated circus act broke up in a bloody riot, Patterson burst into song, ‘Try To Do Your Best For One Another’ in an earnest appeal to the fighting factions to set aside their differences.

Johnny’s melodious precursor to Jimmy’s mawkish plea worked – albeit, temporarily - and not quite in the manner he had intended. For both sides did indeed unite with one another; but only to bludgeon the peacenik clown to death. James Young never suffered so for his art.

Patterson cuts a forlorn figure in Irish theatre history; not because of the tragic-comic circumstances of his death, but for the fact that audiences and historians have long since forgotten he ever existed. The same is largely true for Dion Boucicault, ironically one of the most famous figures of the 19th century stage. An irrepressible impresario, actor and innovator, Boucicault played a hugely important role in the emergence of popular melodrama in this period.

His highly colourful life is brilliantly captured in Parker’s ‘play-full’ staging of the blurred borders between Boucicault’s personal and professional life, which resembles the sensational plots of his own melodramas.

Prolific and profligate, this serial-plagiarist-sometime-bigamist, passed off translations of French plays as his own work and campaigned for copyright laws, which made him vast fortunes that he vertiginously squandered again. He also invented fireproofing for scenery which facilitated the sensational stage spectacles that became his stock-in-trade such as the burning tenements of The Poor of New York (and London, Dublin and ..!)

However, Boucicault’s colossal stature over the 19th century stage cruelly contrasts with the pale shadow it cast over 20th century dramatic criticism: a disparity that makes his mockery of Johnny Patterson bathetically ironic. Later generations of scholars and historians, (not to mention actors and authors), derided Boucicault’s work and dismissed him as a hack; a purveyor of stage-Irishry.

In Heavenly Bodies, Parker plays upon dramatic irony of Boucicault’s own elitist dismissal of Patterson as these same arguments were later deployed to deny Boucicault his rightful place in the dramatic canon as ‘high art’ was privileged over popular culture.

Until relatively recently, official histories of Irish theatre were characterised by Abbey Theatre director Hugh Hunt’s view that this vital Victorian period of drama dominated by Boucicault was ‘best forgotten’ - an attitude shared by the same institution’s founders, W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who despised the popular theatre stage (and the plebs who packed it).

And yet, Boucicault’s influence is pervasive. It ghosts generations of later playwrights’ work: the comic double-acts and music hall knockabout of O’Casey, Beckett, and Behan. Even Conn the Shraughraun’s famous wake scene – fittingly restaged in Parker’s play to enact Boucicault’s stage exit from life – shadows Synge’s Riders to the Sea.

Parker’s affinity with Boucicault (and Patterson) stems from their shared desire to entertain audiences and their delight in theatre’s infinite possibilities for play.

If Heavenly Bodies recuperates two vital footnotes from Irish theatre history to reveal them as forebears of their more famous 20th century descendents, (whose work, as Parker observes, owes more that they, or their critics, have cared to admit), it also reveals the invidious processes of canon formation: how it unfairly relegates major figures to the margins. In doing so, Heavenly Bodies serves as an ironic, if unintended, commentary on the fate that has, hitherto, befallen its author.

It could be argued that the great days of the Eurovision Song Contest are passed, along with Ireland’s proud domination in the field. When Catchpenny Twist was first produced in 1977, we were on the crest of that wave, still riding high on snowdrops and daffodils, butterflies and bees, and the glory days of Johnny Logan just on the horizon.

Meanwhile, there was this appalling spot of bother turning particularly nasty up north. So, just when popular music and the marvel of television were opening up the sparkly vista of European culture, the behemoths of sectarianism still had us in their deadly grip. Monagh, Roy and Martyn, Stewart Parker’s band on the run, reflect a strong impulse on the part of a whole generation to flee the north’s Troubles to seek a less complicated life in the civilised world. Wherever that might be. This was a watershed in the history of Belfast, Ireland, Europe. The EEC was beginning to put together an idea of mutual dependence that was to prove, however imperfect, a bonding agent in a hitherto fractious continent.

Such a hifalutin’ notion seemed a long way off in a country divided against itself. But the emerging generation in Ireland was, for the first time, able to ask itself to which world did it belong, or aspire to: that of the dead generations; or that of international telly?

This intense moment is the stuff that Parker thrived on and he captures perfectly the tension between the two worlds. But what impact does this story have thirty years on?

The astonishing thing is that Catchpenny Twist is still current. The Eurovision Song Contest may be more self-consciously camp than it was thirty years ago, but in that strange, games-without-frontiers-war-without-tears sort of a way, it still seems to matter to the people of Europe, accession states and all. As for the north, the war is officially over, but the behemoths still battle on ... as they have for generations.

So, any suspicion that, for all its brilliance, a play so resonant of its time would date rapidly has proven unfounded. Ersatz Europeanism is still going strong and Ireland is still, post Lisbon, bumping into the Continental furniture. And the British, unhappily stranded in the middle of all this, are still wondering in these days of cable whether we get their television programmes.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. And with the enlargement of the EC a play which looks at how ethnic identity works (or not) within a globalised culture could not be more apt. Perhaps the new audiences of immigrants to Ireland - on each side of the border - will absorb this play with some amusement, and observe that preoccupations of identity and the burden of historical legacies are things all Europeans genuinely have in common. But it’s comforting to reflect that Chinese restaurants are still going strong in Cork.

Publications - Notes by Dr Mark Phelan (QUB)
In honour of the twentieth anniversary of Parker’s death and as a means of bringing these relatively unknown aspects of his oeuvre to the reading public and international scholarly community, Litteraria Pragensia Books and Lagan Press have published a these volumes of primary materials with critical introductions.

All three volumes provide unique and long overdue perspectives on Parker’s work in an accessible format that will extend critical acknowledgement of Parker’s status as one of the most versatile and engaging writers to emerge in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s.

This collection brings together the best of Northern Irish playwright Stewart Parker’s literary prose and journalism. What comes across throughout this volume is Parker’s anticipation and intelligence of the changing cultural conditions of theatre life and play-making in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Alongside this alert cosmopolitan sensibility, Parker’s experience of living in and through Belfast’s self-inflicted wounding made him keenly aware of what happens when politics fails to deliver a democratic answer to the contradictory beliefs of ordinary citizens. His innate scepticism about politics is etched herein with feisty and unambivalent vigour.

Introduced by Gerald Dawe (TCD) will be devoted to Parker’s literary journalism and criticism. Contents compiled by Gerald Dawe and Maria Johnston will include Dramatis Personae (Parker’s John Malone Memorial Lecture); a selection of Parker’s articles from The Irish Times, The Belfast News Letter, Honest Ulsterman, Fortnight, The Evening Standard, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Irish University Review; and the introductions Parker wrote for Lost Belongings, his ‘three plays for Ireland’ and Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge. Postscript by Clare Wallace.

Stewart Parker is one of Northern Ireland’s most witty, eloquent and astute playwrights, yet his work for television is little known. This collection, for the first time, gathers the bulk of his television drama offering a unique and exciting opportunity to encounter another dimension to Parker’s oeuvre. His productivity and inventiveness in this medium match the work for the stage step by step. The plays in this volume exhibit the range and variety of his drama which comprehends comedy and tragedy, the challenge of political and social themes and the exuberance of pure fantasy.

Introduced by Clare Wallace (Charles University) will include the scripts and production details of six of Parker’s television plays: Lost Belongings; Radio Pictures; Blue Money; Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain; Joyce in June; I’m a Dreamer Montreal.

Playwright Stewart Parker was, arguably, Ireland’s first critic of popular culture. From 1970 until 1976, Parker wrote a fortnightly column for The Irish Times devoted to pop music under the title ‘High Pop’. The tagline summed up perfectly the Belfast man’s attitude to contemporary music. At once lightweight and throwaway, it could also aspire to – and achieve – the condition of ‘High Art’ worthy of serious and thoughtful consideration.

Never po-faced, and refreshing in its honesty, the reviews in ‘High Pop’ remain as vibrant, engaging and vital as the day they were written. Whether dealing with the era’s ‘heavyweights’ like Bob Dylan, or ‘flash in the pans’ like Dr Strangely Strange or bringing once again to public attention such figures as Tin Pan Alley songman Jimmy Kennedy, Parker’s captivating enthusiasm for the work under review is unmistakeable.

Edited by Gerald Dawe and Maria Johnston, High Pop is a fascinating trawl through the music of the early 1970s and the glory (and, on occasion, dog) days of the Band, Joni Mitchell, Carole King, John Lennon and the Grateful Dead. It also acts as a primer for the rediscovery of artists and bands fallen into neglect: Be Bop Deluxe, Dory Previn and the Incredible String Band, anybody?

It is often said that humour is commonsense moving at a different speed. In which case, prepare to be entertained and enlightened by a writer clearly besotted with the best of both worlds. High Pop indeed.

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