Tough characters to tackle

Gary Mitchell's drama about being forced out of his home by the UDA opens this week in Féile an Phobail, writes Susan McKay

Last November, Gary Mitchell and his family were forced out of loyalist north Belfast by the UDA. Next week, his powerful new play, Remnants of Fear, opens in republican west Belfast, as part of Féile an Phobail. The play deals with Mitchell's experience, but he has not, as might have been expected, made himself into the heroic victim of the piece. Instead, the central character is based on the teenage boy who led the gang that attacked Mitchell's home.

"Once the dust settled and you'd gone through the initial trauma, you start to think about the others involved," Mitchell says. "Twenty-four teenagers attacked me and my family. Someone had told them there was a legitimate reason. What brought them to the point that they'd do that?" The play shows how the UDA, 12 years after the loyalist ceasefire of 1994, continues to prey upon young people, sending them out to do its dirty work. "I remembered how vulnerable I was as a teenager," says Mitchell. "Once you admit that you could have been that person, there's an empathy."

People keep telling him he's brave, and some have suggested he's mad to write this play at all, while his family is still in exile and under threat. To take it into the heart of enemy territory as part of a festival that has Gerry Adams on its management committee. He shrugs. "Writing plays is what I do," he says.

He is well aware that Dubbeljoint, the company producing the play, has been accused in the past of presenting some work that has more value as propaganda for the republican cause than as art. "Dubbeljoint asked me to write the play. Pam Brighton, who is directing Remnants of Fear, has already directed 13 of my radio plays. There is nothing unusual about my working with her. I would love to be approached by a theatre company based in Rathcoole to do a play for a festival there. I would love working class Protestants to come to see my plays. But there is no such company and no such festival, and working class Protestants still have a deep distrust of every section of the media."

Mitchell has already worked in west Belfast - when the UDA refused to allow him to make As the Beast Sleeps in Rathcoole he had to film some scenes in Republican clubs. Actually, the UDA didn't exactly refuse - the local brigadier told Mitchell: "You can make your wee film, but no cameras." He is pleased that some Protestants, including loyalist ex-prisoners, have indicated that they will be at Remnants of Fear. He wants to make them jealous of west Belfast's flourishing cultural scene, with its drama, its music and its debates. He wants them to want these things. His own youthful ambitions to write were crudely dismissed by his teachers. His peers considered theatre was for "taigs and faggots". Many of them joined the UDA, like their fathers before them.

Mitchell recently revealed that his own granny was in the UDA, back in the pre-1992 days when it was legal, and Remnants of Fear has one of Mitchell's most complex female roles to date in Maud (brilliantly played by Eileen Pollock), a granny who was once in the UDA and is now ambivalent.

During eight years of unemployment as a young man, Mitchell was involved himself in "murky activities" but was considered a failure, insufficiently masculine. He's proud of that failure now, and the exploration of what it is to be a man is central to his work.

In one taut and riveting scene in the play, Charlie battles his brother Geordie for the soul of Charlie's son, Tony. Geordie sneers at Charlie because he left the UDA and allowed his wife to leave him, and because he is poor and with no prospects. Geordie is rich, has a good-looking girlfriend and thinks he can sort everything out, including personal relationships, by coercion and force. This can all be yours, he tells Tony. Charlie can only offer his son inarticulate love and an ordinary life shadowed by the menace of paramilitarism.

Actor Lalor Roddy - who has appeared in several of Mitchell's earlier plays and in the film of As the Beast Sleeps - plays Charlie. He loves the new play. "Gary's is an absolutely unique voice," he says. "His most striking quality is his courage. He is able to put the mundane everydayness of life on stage along with the extremity of life. His characters are real and people can identify with their struggles. After all, there's fear and bullying everywhere."

Pam Brighton says a largely working-class Catholic audience will also identify with the pressure teenagers are under to be greedy for material goods, and the risk that they will be drawn into criminality. She thinks this is Mitchell's best play so far. "His was an astonishing voice from the start, but he is saying more than he did before, going further. There is more analysis. The play transcends the politics, but what he says, politically, is urgent and needs to be said. I had no idea how powerful the UDA is, how like the mafia it is, with its claws in the community, able to bleed it dry."

One of the flyers for the play is headed with the question, "Would you like to know what it is like to live in a loyalist area?" West Belfast Catholics fear the UDA because it assassinated so many of them, but Brighton insists they have no first-hand experience of the fear of paramilitaries from within their own community.

"People here wouldn't understand that fear Gary describes, a fear that has got into the soul," Brighton says firmly. "It is totally different here. There are no parallels."

Alison Mitchell, Gary's wife, is worried. "I fear for Gary's safety," she says. "Gary has no fear." Mitchell launched Féile in July, and said in a characteristically hard-hitting speech that it was a sorry state of affairs that a Protestant like him could feel safe on the Falls Road but not on his own streets.

The play will be controversial and he admits there could be trouble over the play, potentially even in the theatre. Charlie says at one point, "the only thing the Protestant people need to be protected from is the UDA." There are jokes about the negativity of the DUP. There is, Mitchell says, "the potential for fist fights". Brighton says she knew from the start there were risks, but says the company has discussed this and decided that they are worth taking for this play. Mitchell says trouble would be for the security forces to sort out. Brighton says they don't do a very good job, but does not demur. The PSNI is unlikely, however, to receive a warm welcome on the Whiterock Road.

The play goes back to issues Mitchell has explored before. "I had been working on other themes," Mitchell says. "Someone had said to me I had to prove I wasn't a one-trick pony. But when we were attacked it drew me back to the real reason why I started writing. I have a responsibility to my community, to the silent people in their homes." What is new, he says, is that nothing is new. "Loyalists haven't moved on. Communities have not been transformed by peace. Young working-class Protestants don't feel they have any stake in society. The paramilitary organisations have to go away - but they also have to be replaced. Teenagers need to be given other opportunities."

He is delighted that the roles of the two teenagers in the play have gone to two young Protestants, Sam Murdock from Ballymena and Bryan Steenson from the Shankill Road, both of whom put in fine performances in their first major parts.

When the teenage gang descended on his house last winter, Mitchell tried to run after them but couldn't get past his own security locks. He is glad of that now. He reminded himself afterwards, he says, that "my weapons are words". In Remnants of Fear he has once again proved their potency.

• Remnants of Fear runs from tomorrow until Aug 19 in The Rock Theatre, Whiterock Road, Belfast. It will tour later