When Life Is a Drama Unto Itself

This is a city of cemeteries whose high Celtic crosses, blackened by pollution, compete with army aerials and watchtowers for access to heaven.

The Republican Nationalist Catholics have their cemeteries, and the Protestant Unionists have theirs. At least one final resting place has underground walls that separate Protestant and Catholic souls who might have dreams of mingling in the afterlife.

This is also a city of children--everywhere, saucy, knobby-kneed, unafraid--leering at Yanks and soldiers.

Neighborhoods are identified in part by murals, the Protestants with the Royal Ulster Company battalion murals and the Catholic Sinn Fein neighborhoods with the fists and visions of peace and the coffin ships that carried so many of the Irish to America during the famine. The murals are beautiful, and they betray the creativity bubbling so close to the surface of the conflict.

Most of all, this is a city of stories: funny ones, sad ones, told in that dense, rich language of the Irish, in which every word is laden with humor and history.

“Binlids,” a play written primarily by a group of women from West Belfast, tells the story of that community during the period from 1971 through 1988, when the British government imprisoned hundreds of Catholics.

It is a co-production of DubbleJoint, a nationally known theater company, and Justus, a community theater group for women in West Belfast. In the 1980s, this community was united and strengthened by its allegiance to Sinn Fein, the nationalist group that was able, in that decade, to gain enough political support to win a seat in Westminster and seats on the Belfast City Council.

Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, is a character in the play, as are Maire Drumm, a former vice president, and other Republican leaders.

The women of West Belfast patrolled their neighborhood at night, alerting people to the presence of British soldiers by banging the lids of trash bins and blowing whistles. These are women whose husbands, fathers, brothers and children were carried off, tortured and killed by Unionists and British soldiers.

“Binlids” opened recently in a West Belfast theater after an overwhelmingly successful run last August at the West Belfast Festival. In October, it will open in New York at the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts, and there are hopes of bringing it to Los Angeles in 1999.

The last month has seen at least 10 people killed in Belfast, two Protestant Unionists and eight Catholic Republicans, despite the July 20 cease-fire that kept streets relatively safe and quiet for several months. On the wintry Monday night of the opening, however, after talks in Dublin in which Sinn Fein was officially expelled from the peace process, increased British army presence was everywhere in evidence, in tanks that rumbled through the streets and soldiers pacing through such Catholic neighborhoods as Beechmount and Lower Falls Road.

“Binlids” is hardly a pleasant escape from the tensions on the street. “It’s tough to watch,” said Tom Hartley, the city counselor representing Sinn Fein from the Lower Falls district of Belfast and a longtime party intellectual, when asked about “Binlids.” “In some ways it’s too realistic, in others it’s like watching a myna bird use your words.” Danny Morrison, a novelist and former publicity director for Sinn Fein who wrote a few scenes in the play, eloquently describes the difficulty of being an artist in a city brimming with propaganda of all stripes, where the word “propagandist” is the worst epithet one can spit at a writer. After four successful novels about Northern Ireland, he wants to write a fictional memoir about his pre-political childhood. “I came out of seven years in prison divorced, homeless and a grandfather,” he only half- jokes. “Now I want to be loyal to the creative side of my character.”

Has life in Belfast changed since the notoriously violent decades depicted in “Binlids”?

Liam Stone, a 41-year-old Republican, was imprisoned in Long Kesh prison, site of the hunger strikes in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and reports of various forms of torture from 1976 to 1983. In 1990, he went to Queens College in Belfast to finish his education and studied the tradition, not just in Ireland, of political testimonials. He says that he would like to see “Binlids” but has heard that it is almost too realistic.

Just a few weeks ago, a friend of his was killed by a loyalist. It was not until he saw the date on the gravestone that he realized another close friend had been killed exactly 26 years earlier, at just 15 years old, not 50 yards from where 28-year-old Terry Enright, a fellow youth worker, was so recently shot.

Jackie Redpath, a Protestant community organizer in the Shankhill district, says that since the cease-fire, he has seen an increase in a sort of “ghetto mentality,” with communities more than ever marking their respective territories.

It is a measure of this separation that he has not even heard of “Binlids.” He does say that the peace process has given people some hope of not being slain on the street. “Hope destroyed,” he says, “is better than hope that never existed.”

Watching “Binlids” is an exhausting experience. The audience stands, surrounded by five stages on which the play is performed. As part of the play, soldiers with machine guns walk through the crowd. Children distribute leaflets, and processions bearing coffins carve paths through the audience. Off to one side is a gallery where elderly people are allowed to sit to watch the performance, which is punctuated by members of the audience bursting into tears or nodding vigorously as they remember those years.

“It really happened,” says one woman, who has brought her daughter over from New Jersey to see the play. She apologizes for the play’s bad language. “It’s a bit strong,” she says, “but it has to come out.”

In the audience, a group of boys in their early teens look nervously from stage to stage, their bodies convulsing after each gunshot.

They giggle nervously at a scene in which a young boy is forced to kneel at gunpoint by laughing soldiers. They try to look tough during the scene in which a prisoner is tortured with a bag over his head and white noise blasted in his ears.

The little girls here display much more bravado, snaking through the crowd and clustering around the stages. They look defiant during a scene in which a young girl, killed by a plastic bullet, is held by her weeping mother. At intermission, one of the girls says proudly that her grandmother was killed by a plastic bullet. She is proud of her heritage but is too afraid to give her name.

It seems like everyone on the stage and in this audience has lost a family member or a friend. The stories told in “Binlids” have been repeated again and again in the living rooms and streets of this neighborhood.

“She was so powerful,” says Bridie McMahon, the actress who plays political leader Maire Drumm, who was shot and killed in the hospital. “When she made speeches, 17-year-old girls joined the IRA.”

“Sure, this play has been called propaganda,” says Pam Brighton, director of “Binlids,” “but it’s really about grace under pressure.”