Browse content similar to In the Shadow of the Shipyard. Check below for episodes and series from the same categories and more!
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Thousands of men once crossed this bridge every morning on their way to | 0:00:10 | 0:00:14 | |
work in one of Belfast's most historic landmarks - the shipyard. | 0:00:14 | 0:00:20 | |
It has loomed large in the history of my family. | 0:00:29 | 0:00:32 | |
My grandfather, my uncles, my father, | 0:00:32 | 0:00:34 | |
all passed through its gates. | 0:00:34 | 0:00:36 | |
As for me, my play, The Boat Factory, | 0:00:36 | 0:00:39 | |
it tells of their experiences. | 0:00:39 | 0:00:41 | |
But I wasn't the first. | 0:00:41 | 0:00:43 | |
SHIP'S HORN | 0:00:43 | 0:00:46 | |
While most of the men were building ships, | 0:00:48 | 0:00:50 | |
there were others at work with their pens, | 0:00:50 | 0:00:53 | |
inspired by this yard | 0:00:53 | 0:00:55 | |
and the people of east Belfast who live beside it. | 0:00:55 | 0:00:58 | |
St John Ervine, born in Ballymacarrett, | 0:01:02 | 0:01:05 | |
gave a voice to early 20th century urban and rural Ulster | 0:01:05 | 0:01:09 | |
with his ground-breaking plays. | 0:01:09 | 0:01:11 | |
Thomas Carnduff was a shipyard labourer who dramatised the lives | 0:01:13 | 0:01:18 | |
of working-class Belfast people during the recession of the 1930s. | 0:01:18 | 0:01:23 | |
Sam Thompson was a painter and a fiery trade unionist | 0:01:24 | 0:01:27 | |
who challenged the establishment with | 0:01:27 | 0:01:30 | |
one of the most controversial plays of the 1960s. | 0:01:30 | 0:01:33 | |
And Stewart Parker gave voice to a new generation | 0:01:36 | 0:01:40 | |
in the 1970s and 1980s. | 0:01:40 | 0:01:43 | |
Visionary and witty, his plays are strongly rooted in a Belfast | 0:01:43 | 0:01:48 | |
troubled by the ghosts of its past and its present. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:51 | |
These writers span a century of change in this city. | 0:01:53 | 0:01:58 | |
Collectively, they have articulated the poverty and the politics, | 0:01:58 | 0:02:02 | |
the hardship and the hopes of the ordinary working men | 0:02:02 | 0:02:06 | |
and women of Belfast | 0:02:06 | 0:02:08 | |
and, more importantly, put their voices on the stage. | 0:02:08 | 0:02:12 | |
All of them were inspired by, and forged their ideas, | 0:02:15 | 0:02:19 | |
here in the shadow of the shipyard. | 0:02:19 | 0:02:23 | |
HORN BLOWS | 0:02:25 | 0:02:27 | |
To understand a writer, | 0:02:35 | 0:02:37 | |
you need to understand where he or she came from. | 0:02:37 | 0:02:40 | |
And for these four playwrights, men who have inspired me | 0:02:40 | 0:02:44 | |
as an actor and director, that means appreciating the very | 0:02:44 | 0:02:48 | |
particular history of where they and I came from - east Belfast. | 0:02:48 | 0:02:54 | |
The River Lagan is the natural marker that divides | 0:02:57 | 0:03:01 | |
the east from the rest of Belfast. | 0:03:01 | 0:03:03 | |
A couple of hundred years ago, the original town lay where the | 0:03:04 | 0:03:08 | |
Cathedral Quarter is now. | 0:03:08 | 0:03:10 | |
The east only became part of Belfast in 1853 | 0:03:12 | 0:03:17 | |
when land was needed for new industries, and the town boundary | 0:03:17 | 0:03:20 | |
was extended to include the County Down side of the river. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:25 | |
What I'm keen to know is, why did the city jump the river? | 0:03:25 | 0:03:28 | |
You have to go to a lot of trouble to build all those bridges. | 0:03:28 | 0:03:31 | |
When I grew up, east Belfast was just industrial, | 0:03:31 | 0:03:34 | |
it was always that way. But what was there before? | 0:03:34 | 0:03:37 | |
The answer may be inside this magnificent building, | 0:03:44 | 0:03:48 | |
the Belfast Harbour Commissioner's Office. | 0:03:48 | 0:03:50 | |
A painting from 1864 shows A View Of Sydenham, and tells us | 0:03:54 | 0:04:00 | |
what was here - just two dozen large houses inhabited by business owners. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:05 | |
By 1902, the population has expanded to 300,000, | 0:04:07 | 0:04:12 | |
an influx from the countryside | 0:04:12 | 0:04:14 | |
to work in the factories and the industries, | 0:04:14 | 0:04:16 | |
and the streets of east Belfast begin to take shape. | 0:04:16 | 0:04:20 | |
Ballymacarrett is the oldest part of the east, | 0:04:26 | 0:04:29 | |
where there were two decisive moments in the 19th century. | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
The harbour was dredged to create a deep water port. | 0:04:35 | 0:04:38 | |
Then the tracks were laid | 0:04:40 | 0:04:42 | |
for the Belfast and County Down Railway through east Belfast. | 0:04:42 | 0:04:46 | |
There was a boom in industry, with new shipyards, ropeworks, | 0:04:49 | 0:04:54 | |
engineering plants and whiskey distilleries. | 0:04:54 | 0:04:57 | |
Men and women from rural parts of Ulster arrived in their droves, | 0:04:57 | 0:05:01 | |
lured to the city by the promise of work. | 0:05:01 | 0:05:05 | |
And the rows of red brick terraces built to house them | 0:05:05 | 0:05:07 | |
ensured the spread of the city eastwards. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
Harland and Wolff Shipyard alone employed over 30,000 men. | 0:05:12 | 0:05:16 | |
But other heavy industries, like the Workman Clark shipyard, | 0:05:16 | 0:05:19 | |
the Sirocco Engineering Works, the Belfast Ropework Company, | 0:05:19 | 0:05:23 | |
the St Ann's Iron Works Company, the Brickworks... | 0:05:23 | 0:05:27 | |
..they all required a workforce as well. | 0:05:28 | 0:05:30 | |
Well, in many ways, east Belfast is different to the rest of Belfast. | 0:05:33 | 0:05:37 | |
It's a rural, Ulster-Scottish kind of culture. | 0:05:37 | 0:05:40 | |
If you look at Belfast, | 0:05:40 | 0:05:42 | |
even now, east Belfast is fringed | 0:05:42 | 0:05:44 | |
by Ulster-Scots words, things like Tillysburn, Redburn, Cairnburn. | 0:05:44 | 0:05:49 | |
We can imagine that these are named | 0:05:49 | 0:05:51 | |
by local people who are Scots-speaking. | 0:05:51 | 0:05:54 | |
It's very different to, um, to what's going on elsewhere. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:58 | |
Tell me a little bit about the diversity of the people | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
who found themselves working in that area. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:04 | |
This creates a melting pot. | 0:06:04 | 0:06:05 | |
Belfast vernacular comes out of a variety | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
of different types of Englishes. | 0:06:09 | 0:06:11 | |
Hiberno-English, Ulster Scots. | 0:06:11 | 0:06:13 | |
And you see the strong vernacular culture developing | 0:06:13 | 0:06:17 | |
because of the dynamism and the difference. | 0:06:17 | 0:06:20 | |
Spoken word becomes really powerful in people's minds, | 0:06:20 | 0:06:25 | |
and they have to express this, so they find ways of doing it. | 0:06:25 | 0:06:28 | |
The word "culture" is bandied about here a lot. | 0:06:28 | 0:06:33 | |
What is the culture of east Belfast? | 0:06:33 | 0:06:36 | |
Culture of east Belfast is...is a tricky one to define. | 0:06:36 | 0:06:41 | |
One might say that there is an awareness of the industrial culture. | 0:06:45 | 0:06:51 | |
You see the city, you see industry, you see the great, | 0:06:51 | 0:06:55 | |
red wall of the rope works. | 0:06:55 | 0:06:57 | |
But if you turn around, you see what CS Lewis called | 0:06:57 | 0:07:01 | |
the boundless northern sky, | 0:07:01 | 0:07:04 | |
and the things that, often, | 0:07:04 | 0:07:06 | |
working class people are told that they shouldn't have | 0:07:06 | 0:07:08 | |
interests in - the idea of art and ideas and politics | 0:07:08 | 0:07:13 | |
and philosophy and literature. | 0:07:13 | 0:07:15 | |
And there's this tension within east Belfast, in a sense, | 0:07:15 | 0:07:19 | |
which way you turn. | 0:07:19 | 0:07:21 | |
And these writers are aware of both of those things, | 0:07:21 | 0:07:25 | |
and they grasp the opportunity to move beyond | 0:07:25 | 0:07:28 | |
where the red brick walls might place them. | 0:07:28 | 0:07:32 | |
In 1911, shipbuilder Gustav Wolff penned a rhyme to the east, | 0:07:40 | 0:07:45 | |
his favourite part of Belfast. | 0:07:45 | 0:07:48 | |
He wrote, "You may talk of your Edinburgh | 0:07:48 | 0:07:51 | |
"and the beauties of Perth | 0:07:51 | 0:07:53 | |
"And all the large cities famed on the earth | 0:07:53 | 0:07:57 | |
"But give me my house, though it be but a garret | 0:07:57 | 0:08:00 | |
"In the pleasant surroundings of Ballymacarrett.' | 0:08:00 | 0:08:03 | |
Wolff's workers had good reason to have a less rose-tinted | 0:08:06 | 0:08:09 | |
view of their surroundings. | 0:08:09 | 0:08:11 | |
It was thanks to their labour that Belfast had become famous | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
as one of the world's greatest manufacturers of ships. | 0:08:14 | 0:08:18 | |
SHIPS' HORNS | 0:08:19 | 0:08:22 | |
But it came at a cost. | 0:08:23 | 0:08:24 | |
Relentless, physically punishing work, | 0:08:24 | 0:08:27 | |
cramped housing, unfair wages and tensions between | 0:08:27 | 0:08:30 | |
Protestants and Catholics in the yard that spilled out | 0:08:30 | 0:08:34 | |
into the streets adjacent to it. | 0:08:34 | 0:08:36 | |
As the 19th century turned into the 20th, a teenage boy observed | 0:08:38 | 0:08:43 | |
the tumult of life outside his door and began writing it down. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:47 | |
This church, Westbourne Presbyterian, was built in 1880, | 0:08:52 | 0:08:57 | |
but it's more commonly known, | 0:08:57 | 0:08:59 | |
even today, as the Shipyard Church. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:02 | |
These walls once rang with the voices of local men | 0:09:08 | 0:09:12 | |
and women who worshipped here every Sunday morning. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:15 | |
And their children, they attended the school just next door. | 0:09:15 | 0:09:18 | |
This church could hold up to 1,500 people. | 0:09:20 | 0:09:24 | |
That's 500 more than the Grand Opera House in Belfast. | 0:09:24 | 0:09:28 | |
And I have it on very good authority that, | 0:09:28 | 0:09:31 | |
often, it was standing room only. | 0:09:31 | 0:09:33 | |
There's a blue plaque high up on the old school wall | 0:09:47 | 0:09:49 | |
to commemorate one of its brightest students, | 0:09:49 | 0:09:52 | |
John Greer Ervine, writer and playwright. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:56 | |
He later adopted the St John Ervine, | 0:09:56 | 0:10:00 | |
as a sort of dramatic flourish. | 0:10:00 | 0:10:02 | |
St John Ervine wrote plays that were performed in Belfast, Dublin, | 0:10:06 | 0:10:11 | |
London's West End and Broadway. | 0:10:11 | 0:10:14 | |
He counted amongst his friends leading | 0:10:14 | 0:10:17 | |
literary figures of the day, such as George Bernard Shaw and WB Yeats. | 0:10:17 | 0:10:23 | |
His early life, however, was spent in much humbler surroundings, | 0:10:23 | 0:10:26 | |
here on the Albertbridge Road. | 0:10:26 | 0:10:28 | |
His father died in the year Ervine was born, | 0:10:30 | 0:10:34 | |
so it was the women in his life | 0:10:34 | 0:10:35 | |
who became his greatest source of inspiration. | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
His grandmother was from Donaghadee, an Ulster-Scot, who moved, like | 0:10:38 | 0:10:43 | |
so many others, from the country to Belfast in search of work. | 0:10:43 | 0:10:46 | |
This determined and enterprising woman set up a hardware shop | 0:10:57 | 0:11:01 | |
on the Albertbridge Road. | 0:11:01 | 0:11:03 | |
Ervine spent much of his childhood in it, | 0:11:03 | 0:11:06 | |
and both the setting | 0:11:06 | 0:11:07 | |
and his grandmother's distinctive turn of phrase | 0:11:07 | 0:11:10 | |
found their way into what is perhaps Ervine's best loved play, | 0:11:10 | 0:11:15 | |
a rural comedy called Boyd's Shop. | 0:11:15 | 0:11:18 | |
Another influence, however, | 0:11:19 | 0:11:21 | |
was the unusual household kept by his mother. | 0:11:21 | 0:11:24 | |
The young widow ran a boarding house for deaf-mutes. | 0:11:25 | 0:11:29 | |
One of the male boarders is listed as a driller from the shipyard. | 0:11:29 | 0:11:34 | |
But perhaps more significantly was the fact that | 0:11:34 | 0:11:36 | |
Protestant boarders sat alongside catholic boarders | 0:11:36 | 0:11:39 | |
at Mrs Ervine's dinner table. | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
Ervine's childhood home clearly welcomed guests | 0:11:44 | 0:11:47 | |
irrespective of religion. | 0:11:47 | 0:11:49 | |
And growing up in this tolerant atmosphere arguably | 0:11:49 | 0:11:52 | |
inspired one of Ervine's earliest and most successful plays, | 0:11:52 | 0:11:56 | |
Mixed Marriage, a cautionary tale on the dangers of religious prejudice. | 0:11:56 | 0:12:01 | |
A meeting with the influential WB Yeats in London led to | 0:12:08 | 0:12:13 | |
Mixed Marriage being staged here at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, | 0:12:13 | 0:12:17 | |
under the direction of Lennox Robinson. | 0:12:17 | 0:12:19 | |
The play caught the mood of the time. | 0:12:21 | 0:12:24 | |
It's set in the working class home of the Rainey family. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:27 | |
The men have been called out on strike, | 0:12:27 | 0:12:29 | |
and there are fears that it might erupt into sectarian violence. | 0:12:29 | 0:12:33 | |
John Rainey, the head of the household, | 0:12:33 | 0:12:34 | |
shows his prejudice against | 0:12:34 | 0:12:36 | |
the marriage of Catholics and Protestants | 0:12:36 | 0:12:38 | |
when he discovers that his son, Hugh, is courting a Catholic girl. | 0:12:38 | 0:12:42 | |
Did I hear you say you're going to marry this woman? | 0:12:43 | 0:12:46 | |
-You did. -And you're going to take him, I suppose. -I am. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:51 | |
You're a Catholic, aren't you? | 0:12:51 | 0:12:53 | |
Yes, I am. | 0:12:53 | 0:12:55 | |
Isn't it against your religion to be marrying a Protestant? | 0:12:55 | 0:12:59 | |
Well, it can be done. But I don't care. | 0:12:59 | 0:13:02 | |
-Will you turn Protestant if you marry him? -No. No, I won't. | 0:13:02 | 0:13:06 | |
That production was very faithful to the period. | 0:13:08 | 0:13:11 | |
I think that's exactly what people here | 0:13:11 | 0:13:13 | |
in the Abbey would have seen 100 years ago. | 0:13:13 | 0:13:16 | |
The play ends in tragedy. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:18 | |
Nora, blaming herself for causing a rift between Rainey | 0:13:18 | 0:13:21 | |
and his son, rushes out of the house amidst a riot and is shot dead. | 0:13:21 | 0:13:26 | |
GUNSHOT | 0:13:26 | 0:13:28 | |
Mixed Marriage premiered on the 30th March 1911. | 0:13:33 | 0:13:38 | |
Due to run for just four nights, | 0:13:38 | 0:13:40 | |
it was so successful that it was put on again a fortnight later. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:44 | |
The Abbey then took the play on tour to the Royal Court in London | 0:13:44 | 0:13:47 | |
and from there travelled to Broadway, New York, | 0:13:47 | 0:13:50 | |
before finally staging it in Belfast in 1912. | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
Mixed Marriage was a runaway hit, a transatlantic success | 0:13:56 | 0:14:00 | |
and St John Ervine's reputation as a playwright was firmly established. | 0:14:00 | 0:14:05 | |
It's an extraordinary play. | 0:14:05 | 0:14:07 | |
For the first time, the voices of the ordinary, | 0:14:07 | 0:14:10 | |
working-class men and women of Belfast are heard on the stage. | 0:14:10 | 0:14:14 | |
And just as important, it's also a dire warning of | 0:14:14 | 0:14:18 | |
the potentially fatal consequences of religious prejudice. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:22 | |
The success of Mixed Marriage eventually led to Ervine's | 0:14:25 | 0:14:28 | |
appointment as the manager of the Abbey Theatre in 1915, | 0:14:28 | 0:14:32 | |
but his time here was unhappy and short-lived. | 0:14:32 | 0:14:35 | |
How do you think Ervine's stint at the Abbey | 0:14:37 | 0:14:39 | |
affected his career as a playwright? | 0:14:39 | 0:14:42 | |
He was very unhappy with the Abbey players. | 0:14:42 | 0:14:47 | |
He thought they were a fairly undisciplined lot, | 0:14:47 | 0:14:49 | |
and, of course, they thought that he was an absolute tyrant. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:52 | |
It didn't help that he was manager of the Abbey | 0:14:52 | 0:14:55 | |
during and after Easter 1916, | 0:14:55 | 0:14:59 | |
a very bad time to be doing anything in Dublin. | 0:14:59 | 0:15:02 | |
And a number of the Abbey Players were, in fact, | 0:15:02 | 0:15:04 | |
active in the Easter Rising. | 0:15:04 | 0:15:06 | |
He was maverick in his politics | 0:15:06 | 0:15:09 | |
and when he went off to fight on the Western Front, | 0:15:09 | 0:15:11 | |
his decision to fight with an Irish regiment rather than with | 0:15:11 | 0:15:17 | |
the Ulster Division in itself seems to signal a continuing | 0:15:17 | 0:15:20 | |
attachment to Ireland rather than to Britain more generally. | 0:15:20 | 0:15:24 | |
Ervine was wounded during the First World War. | 0:15:26 | 0:15:29 | |
He actually took a bullet in the knee in March 1918. | 0:15:29 | 0:15:33 | |
And, erm, it turned out that it was much more serious | 0:15:33 | 0:15:36 | |
than at first expected and eventually, | 0:15:36 | 0:15:38 | |
the leg had to be amputated. | 0:15:38 | 0:15:41 | |
People said to him from time to time, "Why are you so cantankerous?" | 0:15:41 | 0:15:44 | |
Because he could be very cantankerous, which I think came | 0:15:44 | 0:15:46 | |
from the irritability of being in constant pain from that leg injury. | 0:15:46 | 0:15:51 | |
The 20th century, like no other century I think, | 0:15:53 | 0:15:56 | |
had a real crisis of identity going on in Ireland. | 0:15:56 | 0:15:59 | |
He was from Country Down, he worked in Dublin, | 0:15:59 | 0:16:02 | |
he lived in London in England... | 0:16:02 | 0:16:04 | |
What was his identity? | 0:16:04 | 0:16:06 | |
Composite, I think. | 0:16:06 | 0:16:08 | |
When he's in London, people think that he's Irish. | 0:16:08 | 0:16:10 | |
When he's back in Ireland, people think that he's English. | 0:16:10 | 0:16:14 | |
All of these identities - English, Irish, Ulster - | 0:16:14 | 0:16:18 | |
I think feed into the way in which he thinks about himself | 0:16:18 | 0:16:21 | |
and that influences his writing. | 0:16:21 | 0:16:23 | |
After the war, St John Ervine made his home in England. | 0:16:26 | 0:16:30 | |
Despite being in constant pain from his injuries, | 0:16:30 | 0:16:33 | |
he was determined to continue forging a career | 0:16:33 | 0:16:36 | |
as a dramatist and a critic. | 0:16:36 | 0:16:39 | |
He wrote drawing-room comedies such as The First Mrs Fraser | 0:16:39 | 0:16:42 | |
that held appeal for an English audience but, in 1936, | 0:16:42 | 0:16:47 | |
he returned to his Ulster roots with a play that would become | 0:16:47 | 0:16:50 | |
a staple of the local theatre scene here in Belfast. | 0:16:50 | 0:16:53 | |
Boyd's Shop was inspired by his grandmother's hardware shop | 0:16:55 | 0:16:58 | |
and, in a nod to her birthplace, Donaghadee, | 0:16:58 | 0:17:01 | |
he set it in the fictional village of Donaghreagh. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
Billed in its first run as "a simple comedy | 0:17:07 | 0:17:10 | |
"in which the essential kindliness of the Ulster people appears," | 0:17:10 | 0:17:13 | |
Ervine focuses on the gossip and intrigues of village life. | 0:17:13 | 0:17:17 | |
At its heart is a love triangle between the daughter | 0:17:17 | 0:17:20 | |
of shop owner Andrew Boyd, an ambitious young clergyman | 0:17:20 | 0:17:23 | |
and a newcomer to the village. | 0:17:23 | 0:17:26 | |
The play marks the shift in Ervine's politics. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:30 | |
While Mixed Marriage offers a critique of the prejudices | 0:17:30 | 0:17:33 | |
of the Protestant working classes, Boyd's Shop is a much kinder, | 0:17:33 | 0:17:37 | |
almost sentimental portrayal of the Protestant rural middle class. | 0:17:37 | 0:17:42 | |
It was first staged in Belfast in the Ulster Group Theatre in 1940. | 0:17:49 | 0:17:55 | |
Its homespun characters and happy ending | 0:17:55 | 0:17:58 | |
were a welcome respite throughout the war years. | 0:17:58 | 0:18:01 | |
And it was so popular that 42,000 people saw it | 0:18:01 | 0:18:04 | |
performed between 1940 and 1944. | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
This success led to Boyd's Shop being made into a film in 1960 | 0:18:09 | 0:18:14 | |
and while the setting and the characters | 0:18:14 | 0:18:16 | |
remain faithful to Ervine's original play, | 0:18:16 | 0:18:19 | |
the language and the accents of the Ulster village are a little... | 0:18:19 | 0:18:25 | |
off. | 0:18:25 | 0:18:26 | |
We're in the wrong business for this town, aren't we? | 0:18:28 | 0:18:31 | |
Selling gossip instead of groceries. | 0:18:31 | 0:18:34 | |
In Boyd's Shop, Ervine wanted to capture the words | 0:18:34 | 0:18:37 | |
and phrases of his Ulster-Scots grandmother. | 0:18:37 | 0:18:40 | |
-ALL: -What did you hear, Miss McClure? | 0:18:40 | 0:18:42 | |
The Reverent Patterson is retiring in a month or two. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
The film, however, | 0:18:45 | 0:18:46 | |
was made with mostly Dublin actors from the Abbey Players. | 0:18:46 | 0:18:49 | |
There's more to a man than success or failure. | 0:18:49 | 0:18:50 | |
More often than not, it's a matter of luck. | 0:18:50 | 0:18:52 | |
Maybe the makers thought an English audience wouldn't notice or care | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
about the accents, but being an actor from Ulster, | 0:18:55 | 0:18:59 | |
I'm going to try a reading in the way Ervine intended... | 0:18:59 | 0:19:02 | |
You look annoyed about something, Father. | 0:19:04 | 0:19:07 | |
I am annoyed. | 0:19:07 | 0:19:09 | |
After the meeting the night, one or two of the elders was | 0:19:09 | 0:19:12 | |
talking about Mr Patterson's remarks before the sermon. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:15 | |
They seem to think he ought to retire. | 0:19:15 | 0:19:18 | |
Well, he's old, Father. | 0:19:18 | 0:19:21 | |
So am I. But I'm damned if I'm retiring. | 0:19:21 | 0:19:24 | |
I don't like it, all this hinting and suggesting behind a man's back. | 0:19:24 | 0:19:28 | |
It's not decent, daughter. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:30 | |
Well... | 0:19:30 | 0:19:31 | |
It's no use thinking about it the night. I'm dropping with fatigue. | 0:19:31 | 0:19:36 | |
-Will you bolt the door or will I? -I'll do it, Father. -It's upset me. | 0:19:36 | 0:19:41 | |
I hate to see people getting up a kind of a conspiracy | 0:19:41 | 0:19:43 | |
behind a man's back. | 0:19:43 | 0:19:44 | |
Goodnight, daughter dear. | 0:19:47 | 0:19:48 | |
Goodnight, Father. | 0:19:49 | 0:19:50 | |
Ervine lived until he was 87. | 0:19:57 | 0:20:00 | |
While he died in Sussex far from his childhood home in Belfast, | 0:20:00 | 0:20:04 | |
he never forgot his roots. | 0:20:04 | 0:20:06 | |
Instead, he celebrated them. | 0:20:06 | 0:20:08 | |
Why should a patch of land called Ulster have such an effect on me | 0:20:10 | 0:20:16 | |
that when I catch sight of it from a ship's deck, | 0:20:16 | 0:20:21 | |
I can feel tears rising in my eyes? | 0:20:21 | 0:20:23 | |
In his later years, Ervine may have left behind the hard-hitting | 0:20:27 | 0:20:31 | |
subject matter of Mixed Marriage, | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
but there was another aspiring writer - a docker - | 0:20:33 | 0:20:37 | |
who was ready to step into the breach. | 0:20:37 | 0:20:39 | |
In the 1930s, Belfast's pride, the shipbuilding industry, | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
was reeling from the impact of a worldwide recession. | 0:20:45 | 0:20:49 | |
Thousands of men who depended on the yards for their livelihood | 0:20:49 | 0:20:52 | |
were suddenly thrown out of work. | 0:20:52 | 0:20:54 | |
One unemployed dock worker took up his pen | 0:20:56 | 0:20:59 | |
and articulated the toll that the poverty | 0:20:59 | 0:21:01 | |
and industrial decline was having on the men and women of Belfast. | 0:21:01 | 0:21:05 | |
His name was Thomas Carnduff. | 0:21:05 | 0:21:08 | |
Carnduff was born in 1886 in Sandy Row | 0:21:14 | 0:21:17 | |
and he would always remain proud of his Protestant heritage. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
He would eventually become a Worshipful Master | 0:21:21 | 0:21:23 | |
in the Independent Orange Order. | 0:21:23 | 0:21:25 | |
His grandparents were Ulster-Scots like those of St John Ervine, | 0:21:25 | 0:21:30 | |
and they had moved from the village of Drumbo to Belfast for work. | 0:21:30 | 0:21:34 | |
Carnduff lost both his parents at an early age and had to fend | 0:21:39 | 0:21:43 | |
for himself in a number of low-paid jobs. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
Married and with four young sons to support, | 0:21:46 | 0:21:49 | |
he found work as a labourer in the shipyards. | 0:21:49 | 0:21:52 | |
Carnduff laboured for 17 backbreaking years | 0:21:56 | 0:21:59 | |
in Workman Clark's, the rival yard to Harland & Wolff. | 0:21:59 | 0:22:03 | |
He was that most unusual of writers, a working man | 0:22:03 | 0:22:06 | |
who was also a poet and a playwright. | 0:22:06 | 0:22:09 | |
He worked a punishing 50-hour week starting at 6am | 0:22:13 | 0:22:17 | |
and finishing at 5.30pm for a pittance. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:20 | |
And there were accidents, sometimes fatal, almost daily. | 0:22:20 | 0:22:24 | |
And then there was always the threat of being laid off hanging over him. | 0:22:24 | 0:22:28 | |
And on the occasions when he was let go, he would gather with the other | 0:22:28 | 0:22:32 | |
men at the gates, hoping that his name would be called for a shift. | 0:22:32 | 0:22:36 | |
Carnduff took pride in his labour. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:43 | |
He saw himself as a member of a workforce that was | 0:22:43 | 0:22:47 | |
contributing to the industrial success of Belfast. | 0:22:47 | 0:22:50 | |
And he enjoyed the company of the men too. | 0:22:50 | 0:22:53 | |
"Rough, hardy characters" but who were also the | 0:22:53 | 0:22:57 | |
"most thoughtful and kindly" he knew. | 0:22:57 | 0:23:00 | |
It was in this energetic world of camaraderie | 0:23:00 | 0:23:02 | |
and hard labour that Carnduff began writing poetry. | 0:23:02 | 0:23:06 | |
These lines are seen every day by the hundreds of visitors | 0:23:22 | 0:23:26 | |
to Titanic Belfast. | 0:23:26 | 0:23:28 | |
They're a homage to the shipyard men by one of their own. | 0:23:28 | 0:23:32 | |
"O city of sound and motion! O city of endless stir! | 0:23:33 | 0:23:39 | |
"From the dawn of a misty morning | 0:23:39 | 0:23:41 | |
"To the fall of the evening air. | 0:23:41 | 0:23:45 | |
"From the night of moving shadows | 0:23:45 | 0:23:47 | |
"To the sound of the shipyard horn. | 0:23:47 | 0:23:51 | |
"We hail thee Queen of the Northland | 0:23:51 | 0:23:54 | |
"We who are Belfast born." | 0:23:54 | 0:23:56 | |
Songs From The Shipyards, Thomas Carnduff, 1924. | 0:23:57 | 0:24:03 | |
At its peak during World War I, | 0:24:09 | 0:24:11 | |
Workman Clark employed over 10,000 men. | 0:24:11 | 0:24:14 | |
By the early 1930s, however, orders had dried up | 0:24:17 | 0:24:21 | |
and most of the workforce was laid off. | 0:24:21 | 0:24:23 | |
Carnduff was one of them. | 0:24:23 | 0:24:25 | |
Just as his money was running out, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:28 | |
Carnduff went to a lecture by the Belfast poet Richard Rowley. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:32 | |
During a chat afterwards, | 0:24:32 | 0:24:34 | |
Rowley suggested that Carnduff write a play. | 0:24:34 | 0:24:36 | |
The very next morning, Carnduff started on Workers. | 0:24:37 | 0:24:41 | |
Into the play, he poured all his experiences of shipyard life. | 0:24:46 | 0:24:50 | |
He would say afterwards, "I had drawn the characters from real life | 0:24:50 | 0:24:55 | |
"and the dialogue was their everyday speech." | 0:24:55 | 0:24:58 | |
Who bargains for you when you want a rise in wages? | 0:24:59 | 0:25:01 | |
Who got you holidays with play and a five-day week? | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
I suppose you think Santa Claus brought them. | 0:25:04 | 0:25:06 | |
I'm telling you, mate, if we'd no trade unions, | 0:25:06 | 0:25:08 | |
they'd be paying us in soap wrappers. | 0:25:08 | 0:25:09 | |
What has the union done for us in this firm, eh? | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
Sure, the working conditions here date back to Methuselah. | 0:25:12 | 0:25:15 | |
Look, Alec, a minute ago, you were the fella that was saying | 0:25:15 | 0:25:18 | |
it was no good of us trying to get better conditions here, | 0:25:18 | 0:25:20 | |
weren't you? | 0:25:20 | 0:25:22 | |
Workers focuses on a group of shipyard men | 0:25:27 | 0:25:29 | |
and the complicated relationship between the violent John Waddell, | 0:25:29 | 0:25:34 | |
his wife Susan and her former sweetheart, John Bowman. | 0:25:34 | 0:25:37 | |
The Grand Opera House rejected it, saying it was too inflammatory | 0:25:39 | 0:25:44 | |
and working-class... | 0:25:44 | 0:25:45 | |
..but to Carnduff's delight, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
it premiered at the Abbey Theatre Dublin on 13th October 1932. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:54 | |
As the audience showed their appreciation, | 0:25:58 | 0:26:00 | |
Carnduff commented that the years of poverty, misery | 0:26:00 | 0:26:04 | |
and disappointment were forgotten in the solitary moment from heaven. | 0:26:04 | 0:26:10 | |
He also found humour in the fact that he was | 0:26:10 | 0:26:11 | |
an Orangeman from Sandy Row being applauded on the Dublin stage. | 0:26:11 | 0:26:17 | |
APPLAUSE | 0:26:17 | 0:26:19 | |
Deafening cheers, a dozen curtains and imperative clamour for author | 0:26:21 | 0:26:25 | |
marked the end of Thomas Carnduff's Workers. | 0:26:25 | 0:26:28 | |
When the author thanked them for their sympathetic | 0:26:28 | 0:26:31 | |
reception of his play, a woman in the stalls cried, | 0:26:31 | 0:26:34 | |
"It was worth it!" And a man urged him to write ten more. | 0:26:34 | 0:26:37 | |
One critic said that the dialogue was delightfully natural, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
written with the true eye of a keen observer. | 0:26:43 | 0:26:45 | |
I think in this case, for once, the critic was right. | 0:26:47 | 0:26:50 | |
Next up was Belfast. | 0:26:56 | 0:26:58 | |
But would Carnduff's controversial play be a success | 0:26:58 | 0:27:01 | |
when it opened at the city's Empire Theatre? | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
The answer is... | 0:27:07 | 0:27:09 | |
yes. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:10 | |
"Last night's splendid audience not only applauded | 0:27:10 | 0:27:13 | |
"warmly at the final curtain, | 0:27:13 | 0:27:15 | |
"but also throughout the action of the play, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:17 | |
"many of the forceful lines exciting spontaneous approval." | 0:27:17 | 0:27:21 | |
Carnduff went on to write three more plays - Machinery, | 0:27:24 | 0:27:28 | |
Traitors and Castlereagh. | 0:27:28 | 0:27:30 | |
Again, these plays garnered good reviews | 0:27:30 | 0:27:32 | |
and filled theatres in Dublin and Belfast. | 0:27:32 | 0:27:35 | |
Curiously though, after Carnduff's death in the 1950s, | 0:27:36 | 0:27:40 | |
the plays almost totally vanished from the public domain. | 0:27:40 | 0:27:44 | |
Today, his papers are held here at Queen's University, Belfast | 0:27:45 | 0:27:49 | |
and his precious typewriter has been lovingly preserved | 0:27:49 | 0:27:53 | |
by the Ulster Museum. | 0:27:53 | 0:27:54 | |
Tell me about the physical mechanics of Thomas Carnduff writing | 0:27:58 | 0:28:03 | |
plays on this typewriter. | 0:28:03 | 0:28:04 | |
Well, you can see it's a travelling typewriter. | 0:28:05 | 0:28:08 | |
And that was very useful because he had to move digs regularly | 0:28:08 | 0:28:13 | |
when he was laid off at the shipyard, | 0:28:13 | 0:28:15 | |
so this little machine was ideal for that. | 0:28:15 | 0:28:17 | |
The only problem that came across was that he was very poor. | 0:28:17 | 0:28:20 | |
He frequently was out of ribbons and paper, which he had to borrow | 0:28:20 | 0:28:24 | |
or beg for and so he would sit in very, very cold lodging rooms | 0:28:24 | 0:28:29 | |
in the very damp, wet conditions | 0:28:29 | 0:28:31 | |
of those back-street terraced houses in Belfast | 0:28:31 | 0:28:34 | |
with gloves on and he would tap away determinedly. | 0:28:34 | 0:28:41 | |
And his own family didn't really appreciate what he was doing. | 0:28:41 | 0:28:44 | |
They thought he was wasting his time. | 0:28:44 | 0:28:46 | |
But all through that, he sat tapping away at that little machine. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:50 | |
That was his sole road to freedom, to a wider audience. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:56 | |
This is a copy of Carnduff's letters to Mary who was his wife and muse. | 0:28:56 | 0:29:01 | |
Well, you can see here quite clearly, | 0:29:01 | 0:29:03 | |
it's a measure of how poor he was that he couldn't afford paper | 0:29:03 | 0:29:05 | |
many times in his writing life, so he appropriated, | 0:29:05 | 0:29:09 | |
borrowed and begged for paper and he used both sides of it. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:13 | |
And he writes to Mary, "It took 18 long years to climb up | 0:29:14 | 0:29:18 | |
"the little distance I managed, and I had to start at the very bottom. | 0:29:18 | 0:29:22 | |
"While others were having a good time, I was working hard. | 0:29:22 | 0:29:26 | |
"I drank little, gambled little and played little. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:29 | |
"But those boys down at the shipyard didn't half show me their loyalty | 0:29:29 | 0:29:32 | |
"when I had to face public appreciation of my efforts. | 0:29:32 | 0:29:36 | |
"During all those years, I had my dreams." | 0:29:36 | 0:29:40 | |
-Wow! -So this is the means for him achieving his dreams. | 0:29:40 | 0:29:44 | |
What's this image and why is it so important to Thomas Carnduff? | 0:29:45 | 0:29:49 | |
This is Drumbo Round Tower which is in the graveyard | 0:29:50 | 0:29:53 | |
of Drumbo Presbyterian Church. | 0:29:53 | 0:29:57 | |
And this is an imitation of an Irish tower | 0:29:57 | 0:30:00 | |
and Carnduff took this as symbolic of his belonging in Ireland, | 0:30:00 | 0:30:05 | |
because in that graveyard, there are Carnduffs buried. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:08 | |
And he looked at that and in one piece he wrote, | 0:30:08 | 0:30:14 | |
"Is it my fault that my ancestors | 0:30:14 | 0:30:16 | |
"looked on the land with approval and stayed?" | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
So this was a hugely important to him, this was like an identity | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
as a Presbyterian who was born here, but had ancestors elsewhere. | 0:30:22 | 0:30:28 | |
That was hugely important in the Carnduff story. | 0:30:28 | 0:30:31 | |
Carnduff never capitalised on his early success as a writer - | 0:30:38 | 0:30:42 | |
he was the odd man out | 0:30:42 | 0:30:44 | |
in a middle-class literary establishment - | 0:30:44 | 0:30:47 | |
maybe too uncompromising, too critical. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:51 | |
And he certainly never made his fortune from writing. | 0:30:51 | 0:30:54 | |
He remained a working man until the end of his days. | 0:30:54 | 0:30:57 | |
Finally getting a job here in the Linen Hall Library | 0:31:04 | 0:31:08 | |
as a caretaker, I'd like to think he found some consolation | 0:31:08 | 0:31:12 | |
spending his days amongst the books that he loved. | 0:31:12 | 0:31:15 | |
But you can be sure that the world of the shipyard | 0:31:15 | 0:31:18 | |
was never far from his thoughts. | 0:31:18 | 0:31:20 | |
Harland & Wolff survived the recession of the 1930s | 0:31:33 | 0:31:36 | |
and became a major supplier for the armed forces during World War II. | 0:31:36 | 0:31:41 | |
By the 1950s, a new generation of men was working in the yard. | 0:31:41 | 0:31:46 | |
Amongst them was a painter from East Belfast who would redefine | 0:31:46 | 0:31:50 | |
the type of plays that could be staged in Northern Ireland. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:54 | |
He was passionate in his belief that the theatre was the place where | 0:31:59 | 0:32:04 | |
the social and political injustices of the day could be aired. | 0:32:04 | 0:32:09 | |
His name was Sam Thompson. | 0:32:09 | 0:32:11 | |
Thompson was born in 1916 at Montrose Street in Ballymacarrett. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:18 | |
In later life, he would remember being aware, as a young boy, | 0:32:18 | 0:32:21 | |
of two things - that his destiny lay in the shipyard | 0:32:21 | 0:32:24 | |
and that there was tension | 0:32:24 | 0:32:26 | |
between the Catholics and Protestants in his community. | 0:32:26 | 0:32:29 | |
We always played our games on the island part of the park, | 0:32:38 | 0:32:41 | |
across a bridge, and only a stone's throw from the shipyard, | 0:32:41 | 0:32:44 | |
where we could see the red oxide painted boats on the slipways. | 0:32:44 | 0:32:49 | |
There, our fathers and brothers worked. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:51 | |
And some day, we would work there also. | 0:32:51 | 0:32:54 | |
Hello, fellas. That new boat in the slips is away. | 0:33:00 | 0:33:03 | |
It's not away, it's only lanced. My da saw it lanced yesterday. | 0:33:03 | 0:33:07 | |
My da won't take me to see a lance. | 0:33:07 | 0:33:09 | |
He says I'll see enough lances when I'm working in the shipyard. | 0:33:09 | 0:33:13 | |
Hey, there's some fellas, let's challenge them to a match. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
I wouldn't play with them, they're Catholics... | 0:33:16 | 0:33:19 | |
I don't care, I'll play with them if they want to. | 0:33:19 | 0:33:22 | |
Although my playmates and I were around the nine years old mark, | 0:33:22 | 0:33:26 | |
it was the first time we'd met up with other boys | 0:33:26 | 0:33:29 | |
who we knew for sure were Catholics. | 0:33:29 | 0:33:31 | |
And there was no mistaking the tension that existed between us. | 0:33:31 | 0:33:35 | |
Until we realised that neither of us | 0:33:35 | 0:33:37 | |
had horns or pitchforks dangling out of our pockets. | 0:33:37 | 0:33:40 | |
Sam Thompson and his playmates DID end up in the yard. | 0:33:45 | 0:33:48 | |
At the age of 14, he started working at Harland & Wolff | 0:33:48 | 0:33:52 | |
as an apprentice painter. | 0:33:52 | 0:33:54 | |
It was a place that he described as | 0:33:54 | 0:33:56 | |
"a fearful, sprawling mass of gantries, cranes, ships and men". | 0:33:56 | 0:34:01 | |
Soon after he finished his apprenticeship, | 0:34:09 | 0:34:12 | |
he left and began working for Belfast Corporation as a painter. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:16 | |
Some years later, he would write his most famous play, | 0:34:16 | 0:34:20 | |
Over The Bridge, | 0:34:20 | 0:34:22 | |
but for now he was painting the underside of this one... | 0:34:22 | 0:34:25 | |
..the Albert Bridge. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:28 | |
It was a dirty, unpleasant job. | 0:34:28 | 0:34:30 | |
Sam noticed that some men were assigned it and others weren't. | 0:34:30 | 0:34:34 | |
This triggered a desire to do something about it, | 0:34:34 | 0:34:37 | |
so he became a shop steward | 0:34:37 | 0:34:38 | |
and negotiated a rota system with the management. | 0:34:38 | 0:34:41 | |
His union activities got him the sack. | 0:34:41 | 0:34:44 | |
Regardless, Thompson remained a lifelong, committed trade unionist | 0:34:46 | 0:34:50 | |
and this, along with his membership | 0:34:50 | 0:34:52 | |
of the Northern Ireland Labour Party, allowed him to stand | 0:34:52 | 0:34:55 | |
outside the dominant Unionist and Nationalist politics of the time. | 0:34:55 | 0:35:00 | |
A friend of Thompson's described him as "always appearing to be | 0:35:00 | 0:35:04 | |
"on the verge of exploding into flames | 0:35:04 | 0:35:06 | |
"at the first glimpse of injustice." | 0:35:06 | 0:35:09 | |
A chance meeting in his local pub with Sam Hanna Bell, | 0:35:18 | 0:35:21 | |
a BBC writer and producer, | 0:35:21 | 0:35:23 | |
gave Thompson the perfect outlet for expressing his passionate beliefs | 0:35:23 | 0:35:28 | |
on the ills of poverty and bigotry that riddled Belfast society. | 0:35:28 | 0:35:33 | |
At first, he wrote nostalgic radio features, | 0:35:35 | 0:35:38 | |
such as The Long Back Street and Brush In Hand | 0:35:38 | 0:35:42 | |
about his childhood in East Belfast and his apprenticeship as a painter. | 0:35:42 | 0:35:46 | |
But in 1955, he began writing the play that would make his name | 0:35:48 | 0:35:53 | |
and stir up one of the biggest controversies to date | 0:35:53 | 0:35:56 | |
on the Belfast stage. | 0:35:56 | 0:35:58 | |
What is Over The Bridge about? | 0:36:03 | 0:36:07 | |
Over The Bridge is a parable of sectarianism in the shipyards | 0:36:07 | 0:36:11 | |
and within the Labour movement in Northern Ireland. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:13 | |
The figure of Davy Mitchell, the main character, decides to protect | 0:36:13 | 0:36:18 | |
a Catholic worker within the shipyard | 0:36:18 | 0:36:20 | |
who is under the threat of a mob. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:23 | |
Sam Thompson would paint in the shipyard, come home, | 0:36:23 | 0:36:26 | |
go into his attic in East Belfast | 0:36:26 | 0:36:29 | |
and write what became Over The Bridge. | 0:36:29 | 0:36:31 | |
But of course, Sam Thompson would say that he'd been writing it | 0:36:31 | 0:36:34 | |
his whole life, and the incident was in fact based on something | 0:36:34 | 0:36:37 | |
he witnessed himself in 1935, | 0:36:37 | 0:36:40 | |
when a Catholic man was beaten to death on the Albert Bridge Road. | 0:36:40 | 0:36:44 | |
If you're not going with us, just where do you think you are going? | 0:36:47 | 0:36:52 | |
To my bench out there when the horn blows to start work. | 0:36:53 | 0:36:57 | |
-But, Davy, they'll tear you apart. -Pete does my meat at that bench. | 0:36:57 | 0:37:01 | |
If he lifts one tool to start work, | 0:37:01 | 0:37:03 | |
I'm duty bound as a fellow trade unionist to work with him. | 0:37:03 | 0:37:07 | |
Two weeks before the play was due to go on, | 0:37:07 | 0:37:10 | |
the board of the Group Theatre decided by six votes to two | 0:37:10 | 0:37:13 | |
to withdraw the play. | 0:37:13 | 0:37:15 | |
There was a very interesting moment where Sam Thompson went round | 0:37:15 | 0:37:18 | |
to the house of John Ritchie McKee, | 0:37:18 | 0:37:20 | |
who was a former estate agent and a golfing companion | 0:37:20 | 0:37:23 | |
of the Unionist Prime Minister Lord Brookeborough. | 0:37:23 | 0:37:26 | |
And Ritchie McKee said, "I can't do this play, | 0:37:26 | 0:37:28 | |
"I can't do Over The Bridge. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:30 | |
"It's too incendiary, what will happen, firstly, | 0:37:30 | 0:37:34 | |
"I regard the language which you use as blasphemous | 0:37:34 | 0:37:37 | |
"and if we show this play, the theatre will be wrecked by a mob." | 0:37:37 | 0:37:41 | |
I don't give a damn about old boy. He's had his chance. | 0:37:41 | 0:37:44 | |
But I do care about you, Davy. | 0:37:44 | 0:37:46 | |
And when that horn blows, there's only one man going out to work, | 0:37:46 | 0:37:49 | |
and by Christ, it's not going to be you. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:51 | |
Just get one of you try to stop me and see what happens. | 0:37:51 | 0:37:53 | |
If I refuse to go out there and work alongside Peter, | 0:37:53 | 0:37:56 | |
everything I've ever fought for and believed in is nothing. | 0:37:56 | 0:38:01 | |
What do you think Sam Thompson was trying to achieve? | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
Sam Thompson's view, in that very combative, pugnacious | 0:38:06 | 0:38:10 | |
and feisty way, is that we have to confront sectarianism. | 0:38:10 | 0:38:15 | |
And I have to show it within this play, so that we can confront it. | 0:38:15 | 0:38:19 | |
You can reason all you like, | 0:38:19 | 0:38:22 | |
but you're not change one iota the feelings of that mob out there. | 0:38:22 | 0:38:25 | |
Come on, lads,, let's start. | 0:38:25 | 0:38:27 | |
The man that tries to stop me doing my duty... | 0:38:27 | 0:38:30 | |
So help me... | 0:38:33 | 0:38:34 | |
..I'll kill them. | 0:38:35 | 0:38:37 | |
Thompson's play pulls no punches. | 0:38:37 | 0:38:39 | |
He writes Davy Mitchell as a fair-minded, courageous | 0:38:39 | 0:38:43 | |
and selfless man who puts his trade union principles | 0:38:43 | 0:38:46 | |
of supporting his Catholic workmate before his own personal safety. | 0:38:46 | 0:38:51 | |
His stand against an angry mob results in | 0:38:51 | 0:38:54 | |
his eventual murder at their hands. | 0:38:54 | 0:38:57 | |
To see it is a shock. You're meant to be shocked by it. | 0:38:57 | 0:39:00 | |
And you're meant to find it abhorrent. | 0:39:00 | 0:39:02 | |
When we didn't see that on stage, | 0:39:02 | 0:39:04 | |
and we didn't hear that on the radio, | 0:39:04 | 0:39:06 | |
even though it was there, was very important. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:09 | |
The play is a great warning from history in that way. | 0:39:09 | 0:39:12 | |
There had been outbreaks of sectarian violence in the yard | 0:39:13 | 0:39:17 | |
in the 1920s and the 1930s | 0:39:17 | 0:39:19 | |
and Thompson believed that it could happen again. | 0:39:19 | 0:39:23 | |
He also believed the issue was not being talked about | 0:39:23 | 0:39:26 | |
by ordinary people and those in power. | 0:39:26 | 0:39:28 | |
He would later say that the play was his own "plea for tolerance". | 0:39:28 | 0:39:33 | |
Getting it onto the stage, however, | 0:39:33 | 0:39:36 | |
would be Thompson's greatest challenge. | 0:39:36 | 0:39:39 | |
Belfast Telegraph, Thursday, May 14, 1959. | 0:39:39 | 0:39:43 | |
"Over The Bridge man gets legal advice. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:46 | |
"Mr Thompson said today that he had done so | 0:39:46 | 0:39:49 | |
"after reading a statement made yesterday By Mr Ritchie McKee, | 0:39:49 | 0:39:54 | |
"chairman of the theatre's board of directors, that, | 0:39:54 | 0:39:57 | |
" 'It is the policy of the directors to keep political | 0:39:57 | 0:40:01 | |
" 'and religious controversies off our stage.' | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
"Mr Thompson said, 'That is an unfortunate statement. | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
" 'Not only for me, but for Ulster playwrights in general. | 0:40:08 | 0:40:12 | |
" 'It lets the playwrights see where he stands with this theatre.' " | 0:40:12 | 0:40:16 | |
Sam Thompson and director James Ellis saw | 0:40:18 | 0:40:22 | |
the withdrawal of the play as censorship. | 0:40:22 | 0:40:24 | |
Ellis resigned from the Group Theatre and although it took | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
months of struggle and strife, the two men set up their own company | 0:40:27 | 0:40:32 | |
and staged Over The Bridge at the Empire Theatre on 27th January 1960. | 0:40:32 | 0:40:38 | |
On the first night when that curtain came down | 0:40:38 | 0:40:41 | |
to an absolutely tremendous reception | 0:40:41 | 0:40:44 | |
from all parts of the house, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:46 | |
I think Sam's and my feelings were both | 0:40:46 | 0:40:49 | |
one of triumph and of justification. | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
There were no missiles being hurled at the stage, there was | 0:40:52 | 0:40:54 | |
nothing but applause. People were standing shouting for the author. | 0:40:54 | 0:40:58 | |
I remember in the confusion having difficulty in introducing him. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:01 | |
There were people from all sections of the community, | 0:41:01 | 0:41:04 | |
people who'd never been in a theatre, | 0:41:04 | 0:41:06 | |
there were shipyard workers who'd never visited a theatre before | 0:41:06 | 0:41:10 | |
and they were on their feet cheering a play about themselves. | 0:41:10 | 0:41:13 | |
Belfast audiences voted with their feet. | 0:41:13 | 0:41:16 | |
Over The Bridge was a roaring success | 0:41:16 | 0:41:18 | |
playing to a full house every night for six weeks. | 0:41:18 | 0:41:22 | |
As Thompson's friend Sam Hanna Bell said, | 0:41:23 | 0:41:26 | |
it was possible to detect | 0:41:26 | 0:41:27 | |
an almost extraordinary feeling of relief | 0:41:27 | 0:41:30 | |
that at last the unclean spectre of sectarianism | 0:41:30 | 0:41:36 | |
had been dragged before the footlights. | 0:41:36 | 0:41:39 | |
I don't know the answers, Rabbie, I don't know. | 0:41:43 | 0:41:47 | |
I've asked myself what unions would be like | 0:41:49 | 0:41:53 | |
if there wasn't men in them like Davy. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:55 | |
And I've wondered what sort of Christians they were | 0:41:55 | 0:41:59 | |
who'd form a mob and maim a man | 0:41:59 | 0:42:02 | |
and murder another in the sacred name of religion. | 0:42:02 | 0:42:07 | |
-And man told me yesterday... -"A ma told me yesterday | 0:42:10 | 0:42:13 | |
"that when the mob went into action, he walked away. | 0:42:13 | 0:42:16 | |
"And so did hundreds of his so-called workmates. | 0:42:16 | 0:42:21 | |
"They said it was none of their business. | 0:42:22 | 0:42:24 | |
"None of their business, Rabbie. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:28 | |
"That's what they said. | 0:42:29 | 0:42:30 | |
"And then they walked away. | 0:42:32 | 0:42:34 | |
"And that's what frightens me. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:36 | |
"They walked away." | 0:42:38 | 0:42:40 | |
The success of Over The Bridge meant that Thompson could become | 0:42:47 | 0:42:50 | |
a full-time writer. | 0:42:50 | 0:42:52 | |
He continued to challenge the status quo in Northern Ireland society | 0:42:52 | 0:42:56 | |
writing three more plays that again explored controversial issues | 0:42:56 | 0:43:00 | |
including evangelism and dirty election tactics. | 0:43:00 | 0:43:03 | |
He said, "A writer like me may criticise his own people | 0:43:03 | 0:43:08 | |
"because he likes them very well." | 0:43:08 | 0:43:10 | |
His career as a playwright, however, was short-lived. | 0:43:13 | 0:43:16 | |
In February 1965, aged just 49, he died of a heart attack | 0:43:16 | 0:43:22 | |
in the offices of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. | 0:43:22 | 0:43:25 | |
This bridge is a relatively new Belfast landmark. | 0:43:28 | 0:43:31 | |
It links the old shipyards with the Victoria Park | 0:43:31 | 0:43:34 | |
and right into the heart of East Belfast. | 0:43:34 | 0:43:36 | |
And also, in recognition of the work of Sam Thompson | 0:43:36 | 0:43:39 | |
as a playwright and trade unionist, it's named after him. | 0:43:39 | 0:43:42 | |
It's a fitting monument because there is an overwhelming sense | 0:43:42 | 0:43:46 | |
of crossing over that bridge to stand beside a workmate | 0:43:46 | 0:43:48 | |
or a friend, just as Sam Thompson did, no matter what the religion. | 0:43:48 | 0:43:53 | |
And also, being able to stand up and speak out about it. | 0:43:53 | 0:43:57 | |
In 1960, a teenage boy who had dreams of becoming a writer, | 0:44:01 | 0:44:06 | |
went to see Over The Bridge with his uncle, a shipwright. | 0:44:06 | 0:44:10 | |
For the boy, it was the first time he had seen characters from his own | 0:44:10 | 0:44:15 | |
community - working-class men and women from Belfast - on the stage. | 0:44:15 | 0:44:20 | |
In later life, | 0:44:20 | 0:44:21 | |
he said it was as if he'd been thrust in front of the mirror | 0:44:21 | 0:44:24 | |
for the first time and he was both scared and delighted by what he saw. | 0:44:24 | 0:44:28 | |
Witnessing the power of theatre in showing the two faces | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
of Belfast working-class life - | 0:44:35 | 0:44:37 | |
ugly and violent, and civilised and decent - | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
was a life-changing experience. | 0:44:40 | 0:44:42 | |
The boy, Stewart Parker, would eventually become | 0:44:44 | 0:44:47 | |
one of Northern Ireland's most lauded and visionary playwrights | 0:44:47 | 0:44:51 | |
of the 1970s and 1980s. | 0:44:51 | 0:44:53 | |
And the mirror he held up to Belfast reflected an image of the city | 0:44:54 | 0:44:59 | |
that was provocative, witty, honest and hopeful | 0:44:59 | 0:45:03 | |
during some its grimmest years. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:05 | |
Parker spent his early childhood here in Sydenham. | 0:45:08 | 0:45:11 | |
As an adult he remembered the trains to and from Bangor | 0:45:12 | 0:45:16 | |
rattling past at the end of the street | 0:45:16 | 0:45:18 | |
and beyond the tracks rose the inevitable gantries of Queen's Island. | 0:45:18 | 0:45:23 | |
Three sounds were constantly in the air. | 0:45:23 | 0:45:26 | |
There was the industrial noise, | 0:45:26 | 0:45:28 | |
the distant clanging of the shipyard | 0:45:28 | 0:45:30 | |
and the sudden roar from the aircraft testing at Shorts. | 0:45:30 | 0:45:34 | |
Tell me what it was like growing up, to have Stewart Parker as a brother. | 0:45:39 | 0:45:43 | |
He had lovely blue eyes, really blonde hair. | 0:45:43 | 0:45:47 | |
And we all mollycoddled him | 0:45:47 | 0:45:49 | |
because he wasn't well and he couldn't come out that much, | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
so we played indoors with him, | 0:45:52 | 0:45:54 | |
colouring in, snakes and ladders, stuff like that. | 0:45:54 | 0:45:56 | |
He had terrific lung problems. | 0:45:56 | 0:45:59 | |
It was called "delicate" in those days, he was a delicate child. | 0:45:59 | 0:46:03 | |
When did you realise that Stewart was a writer? | 0:46:03 | 0:46:06 | |
Well, he told me he was going to be a writer. | 0:46:06 | 0:46:09 | |
I says, "What's your future? What are you going to do?" | 0:46:09 | 0:46:12 | |
"I'm going to be a writer." | 0:46:12 | 0:46:14 | |
And if you read that little poem there, | 0:46:14 | 0:46:16 | |
you'll see what I mean about that. | 0:46:16 | 0:46:18 | |
This poem is titled I Will Write. | 0:46:19 | 0:46:22 | |
"Though soft sleep tempts my leaden eyes to warmth and comfort | 0:46:22 | 0:46:28 | |
"Or fills this pen with rock | 0:46:28 | 0:46:31 | |
"Though trend or temper will always be of my everything, | 0:46:31 | 0:46:35 | |
"Till all but pen and paper stay | 0:46:35 | 0:46:38 | |
"And then they'll never have, I say | 0:46:38 | 0:46:42 | |
"Though the weird masters, time and age | 0:46:42 | 0:46:45 | |
"Make the body an abhorrence | 0:46:45 | 0:46:48 | |
"Pouring senile liquid through the brain | 0:46:48 | 0:46:51 | |
"Turning the hair white | 0:46:51 | 0:46:53 | |
"Still I will write." | 0:46:53 | 0:46:55 | |
-He knew he was going to be a writer. -Yes. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
He wrote the original in 1957, so he was 15, 16, | 0:47:00 | 0:47:04 | |
and then he revised in May 1958. | 0:47:04 | 0:47:07 | |
So that was way early on, before he really seriously started to write. | 0:47:07 | 0:47:11 | |
How did you and your parents feel about somebody who was moving | 0:47:11 | 0:47:15 | |
away from the kind of traditional route the family took? | 0:47:15 | 0:47:18 | |
My father said the usual things to Stewart. | 0:47:18 | 0:47:20 | |
When Stewart said he was going to write, my father said, "Well, | 0:47:20 | 0:47:24 | |
"that'll do till you get a proper job, son, I'm happy with that." | 0:47:24 | 0:47:28 | |
I think that's pretty typical of working-class fathers | 0:47:28 | 0:47:32 | |
whose sons elevate themselves | 0:47:32 | 0:47:34 | |
into literature and stuff like that, you know. | 0:47:34 | 0:47:37 | |
Unlike his predecessors, Thomas Carnduff and Sam Thompson, | 0:47:42 | 0:47:45 | |
Parker wasn't destined for the shipyards. | 0:47:45 | 0:47:48 | |
After the Second World War, | 0:47:48 | 0:47:49 | |
there were a lot of university grants and places available | 0:47:49 | 0:47:53 | |
for smart teenagers from a working-class background. | 0:47:53 | 0:47:56 | |
Parker seized the opportunity with both hands | 0:47:56 | 0:47:58 | |
and came here to the Queen's University of Belfast. | 0:47:58 | 0:48:01 | |
Queen's was a revelation for Parker. | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
He became involved in the drama society, | 0:48:07 | 0:48:09 | |
writing and appearing in revues for the first Queen's Festival. | 0:48:09 | 0:48:13 | |
He wrote and published poetry | 0:48:13 | 0:48:16 | |
and acquired the education that enabled him to travel | 0:48:16 | 0:48:19 | |
and work in America as a tutor for five years after university. | 0:48:19 | 0:48:24 | |
EXPLOSION | 0:48:24 | 0:48:26 | |
However, in August 1969, Parker returned home | 0:48:32 | 0:48:36 | |
to a radically different city. | 0:48:36 | 0:48:39 | |
He recalled later how, "After a long slow simmer, | 0:48:39 | 0:48:43 | |
"the place exploded - the very week I came back. | 0:48:43 | 0:48:47 | |
"Barricades in the streets, gutted buildings, | 0:48:47 | 0:48:50 | |
"the Army everywhere and then gunfire at night." | 0:48:50 | 0:48:53 | |
Parker's relationship with the city of his birth would become | 0:48:56 | 0:48:59 | |
a constant theme throughout his work for radio, stage and screen. | 0:48:59 | 0:49:04 | |
He confessed to a love-hate relationship with Belfast. | 0:49:04 | 0:49:08 | |
But it was also, as a friend of Parker said, | 0:49:08 | 0:49:11 | |
"the live wire that electrified his writing". | 0:49:11 | 0:49:14 | |
And like his predecessors, Irvine, Carnduff and Thompson, | 0:49:15 | 0:49:19 | |
Stewart Parker returned to the industrial heritage of East Belfast. | 0:49:19 | 0:49:23 | |
But his take on the Titanic story, with his radio play The Iceberg, | 0:49:23 | 0:49:28 | |
was not like anything anyone had ever heard before. | 0:49:28 | 0:49:31 | |
SHIP'S HORN BLASTS | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
"At least they could have put us in the table of statistics. | 0:49:36 | 0:49:39 | |
"SS Titanic, length overall - 882 feet, 9 inches, | 0:49:39 | 0:49:44 | |
"gross tonnage - 46,328, | 0:49:44 | 0:49:47 | |
"passenger capacity - 2,440, | 0:49:47 | 0:49:50 | |
"crew - 860. | 0:49:50 | 0:49:52 | |
"Workers killed during construction - 17." | 0:49:52 | 0:49:55 | |
The two main characters in The Iceberg, Hughie and Danny, | 0:49:59 | 0:50:04 | |
are ghosts who died while building Titanic. | 0:50:04 | 0:50:07 | |
Nevertheless, they "join" the passengers on board the maiden voyage. | 0:50:07 | 0:50:11 | |
Their ghostly status gives them freedom to roam the ship | 0:50:11 | 0:50:15 | |
and they weave in and out of first class, third class, the boiler room | 0:50:15 | 0:50:20 | |
and even briefly join Thomas Andrews, | 0:50:20 | 0:50:22 | |
the chief designer of Titanic. | 0:50:22 | 0:50:25 | |
The exchanges between Hughie and Danny are witty and eloquent, | 0:50:28 | 0:50:32 | |
expressed as they are in the vernacular of East Belfast, | 0:50:32 | 0:50:36 | |
but they serve a greater purpose - | 0:50:36 | 0:50:38 | |
to address the bigger issues of the day, things like social injustice | 0:50:38 | 0:50:42 | |
and Home Rule, and ultimately to remind the audience | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
that the deaths of two humble workmen are just as important | 0:50:45 | 0:50:49 | |
as the deaths of the world's wealthiest men. | 0:50:49 | 0:50:52 | |
After writing The Iceberg, broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster in 1975, | 0:50:57 | 0:51:03 | |
Parker fully committed himself to drama. | 0:51:03 | 0:51:06 | |
He gave himself an even greater challenge for his next project - | 0:51:06 | 0:51:09 | |
a stage play that would use the humble bicycle as a symbol | 0:51:09 | 0:51:13 | |
that could potentially unite the divided city of Belfast. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:17 | |
I realised it was going to be difficult to write a play | 0:51:18 | 0:51:21 | |
set in contemporary Belfast, | 0:51:21 | 0:51:23 | |
which would take account of the last 50, 60, 70 years of history there, | 0:51:23 | 0:51:30 | |
and I was searching around for some kind of unifying image, really, | 0:51:30 | 0:51:36 | |
and I just came up with bicycles. | 0:51:36 | 0:51:38 | |
HE SNAPS HIS FINGERS | 0:51:40 | 0:51:42 | |
The evolution of the bicycle! | 0:51:42 | 0:51:45 | |
An illustrated lecture. | 0:51:45 | 0:51:46 | |
Spokesong is set in a run-down Belfast bicycle shop | 0:51:49 | 0:51:52 | |
inspired by Stone's Bicycle Shop, which once stood on Cromac Square. | 0:51:52 | 0:51:57 | |
The main character, Frank Stock, is a good-hearted shop owner | 0:51:57 | 0:52:01 | |
who is under threat from developers, paramilitaries | 0:52:01 | 0:52:04 | |
and his prodigal brother Julian, who is a rival for love interest Daisy. | 0:52:04 | 0:52:09 | |
And then came the internal combustion engine. | 0:52:10 | 0:52:13 | |
Stewart was so far ahead of his time. | 0:52:13 | 0:52:16 | |
In 1975, in the bicycle shop, he gives Frank Stock these words. | 0:52:16 | 0:52:22 | |
"Something more is needed. | 0:52:23 | 0:52:25 | |
"Imagine a fleet of civic bikes, | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
"gleaming with the city's coat of arms, | 0:52:32 | 0:52:35 | |
"stacked on covered racks on every street, which anybody can ride | 0:52:35 | 0:52:39 | |
"anywhere, free of charge, inside the city centre. | 0:52:39 | 0:52:43 | |
"The air clean, the people healthy, | 0:52:43 | 0:52:46 | |
"the time saved, the energy conserved. | 0:52:46 | 0:52:48 | |
"Earth would not have anything to show more fair." | 0:52:48 | 0:52:52 | |
Spokesong offers up a glimmer of hope in a time of gloom and despair. | 0:52:57 | 0:53:02 | |
It catapulted Parker into the limelight and he was awarded | 0:53:02 | 0:53:06 | |
the prestigious Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:10 | |
Stewart Parker really excites me. | 0:53:12 | 0:53:14 | |
I was lucky enough to meet the man and be in his plays | 0:53:14 | 0:53:17 | |
and he brought an exciting, fresh new approach, like new paint. | 0:53:17 | 0:53:20 | |
He had ghosts in his plays, he had flashbacks, | 0:53:20 | 0:53:24 | |
he had music and song and dance, | 0:53:24 | 0:53:26 | |
and bicycles. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:28 | |
Parker had been deeply affected by | 0:53:31 | 0:53:34 | |
his discovery of radical Presbyterianism in 1790s Belfast. | 0:53:34 | 0:53:38 | |
It connected with his belief that his own heritage was more complex | 0:53:38 | 0:53:43 | |
than simply being a Protestant from a largely unionist area of East Belfast. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:48 | |
He said that, "The ancestral wraiths at my elbow are, | 0:53:48 | 0:53:52 | |
"amongst other things, Scots-Irish, Northern English, | 0:53:52 | 0:53:55 | |
"immigrant Huguenot - in short, the usual Belfast mongrel crew." | 0:53:55 | 0:54:01 | |
It must be understood, there is no vendetta against the Orange society. | 0:54:03 | 0:54:07 | |
It's true that many lodges have been formed into companies | 0:54:07 | 0:54:10 | |
of yeomanry by the landlords. | 0:54:10 | 0:54:12 | |
They will be sent against us, just as the Catholic militia are, | 0:54:12 | 0:54:15 | |
but all these men are the gulls of history. | 0:54:15 | 0:54:17 | |
In his highly acclaimed play Northern Star, Parker delves into | 0:54:18 | 0:54:22 | |
the history of the United Irishman Henry Joy McCracken, | 0:54:22 | 0:54:25 | |
one of the Belfast Presbyterians who brought together Protestants | 0:54:25 | 0:54:29 | |
and Catholics in a rising against British rule in 1798. | 0:54:29 | 0:54:34 | |
It is set in a crumbling cottage on Cave Hill, in the aftermath | 0:54:34 | 0:54:38 | |
of the failed rising, just before McCracken is captured and hung. | 0:54:38 | 0:54:43 | |
Throughout, the character of McCracken alternately mourns | 0:54:43 | 0:54:46 | |
and rages against Belfast's lost opportunity of unity | 0:54:46 | 0:54:50 | |
between Protestant and Catholic. | 0:54:50 | 0:54:52 | |
"We can't love it for what it is, only for what it might have been. | 0:54:58 | 0:55:02 | |
"If we had got it right. If we had made it whole. If. | 0:55:03 | 0:55:08 | |
"It's a ghost town now and always will be, | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
"angry and implacable ghosts, me condemned to be one of their number. | 0:55:12 | 0:55:18 | |
"We never made a nation. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:20 | |
"Our brainchild, stillborn, our own fault. | 0:55:21 | 0:55:26 | |
"We botched the birth. | 0:55:26 | 0:55:28 | |
"So what if the English do bequeath us to one another some day? | 0:55:29 | 0:55:34 | |
"What then? | 0:55:34 | 0:55:36 | |
"When there's nobody else to blame except ourselves?" | 0:55:36 | 0:55:41 | |
Parker died tragically young in 1988 after contracting stomach cancer. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:48 | |
He was at the height of his creativity and there's no doubt | 0:55:49 | 0:55:53 | |
that he had many more plays inside him, | 0:55:53 | 0:55:55 | |
but nevertheless, in his relatively short career, | 0:55:55 | 0:55:59 | |
he managed to hold a mirror up to Belfast - | 0:55:59 | 0:56:01 | |
one that showed the city in all its glorious variety and contradictions. | 0:56:01 | 0:56:07 | |
The four playwrights I've been exploring - Ervine, Carnduff, | 0:56:26 | 0:56:31 | |
Thompson and Parker - were all inspired by East Belfast. | 0:56:31 | 0:56:36 | |
They all shared a sense of what was fair and unfair, | 0:56:37 | 0:56:40 | |
and they also had a strong desire to challenge the status quo. | 0:56:40 | 0:56:44 | |
It's often said that it's part of the Ulster-Scots identity | 0:56:44 | 0:56:47 | |
to stand up and to say things that others won't. | 0:56:47 | 0:56:50 | |
In Mixed Marriage, St John Ervine confronted prejudices | 0:57:00 | 0:57:04 | |
about Catholic and Protestant intermarriage, | 0:57:04 | 0:57:06 | |
while in the milder play Boyd's Shop he still reveals | 0:57:06 | 0:57:10 | |
a strong dislike of hypocrisy. | 0:57:10 | 0:57:12 | |
I've seen a great many smart people who seemed awful foolish in the end. | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
Thomas Carnduff was a trailblazer, a man who wrote | 0:57:16 | 0:57:20 | |
about industry and the issues faced by the working-class man in Belfast. | 0:57:20 | 0:57:24 | |
In Over the Bridge, Sam Thompson tackled on stage | 0:57:26 | 0:57:30 | |
issues that weren't being confronted in society. | 0:57:30 | 0:57:33 | |
Stewart Parker started writing in the 1960s, an era of optimism | 0:57:36 | 0:57:41 | |
that was shattered by the Troubles. | 0:57:41 | 0:57:44 | |
But he believed that writing can bring about change - | 0:57:44 | 0:57:47 | |
that it is something inherently worthwhile. | 0:57:47 | 0:57:50 | |
The East has changed, the streets redeveloped and the industries gone. | 0:57:58 | 0:58:02 | |
Only Harland and Wolff, the original biggest and busiest of them, | 0:58:02 | 0:58:06 | |
is still here, and they now repair oil rigs and build wind farms and tidal generators. | 0:58:06 | 0:58:11 | |
Is there a new generation of playwrights waiting in the wings, | 0:58:12 | 0:58:16 | |
ready to articulate what needs to be said about this place? | 0:58:16 | 0:58:19 | |
That's the challenge. | 0:58:19 | 0:58:21 | |
But if they are out there, | 0:58:21 | 0:58:23 | |
they'll be standing on the shoulders of giants. | 0:58:23 | 0:58:26 |