These days, the Community Arts Forum (CAF) people have a way of characterising the growth of community theatre in Belfast as a "movement". Certainly, their latest production from under the CAF banner, The Wedding - about a mixed Protestant-Catholic marriage - is a courageous and ambitious step in that direction, for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it's an unprecedented collaboration between members of community drama groups from right across the city and the sectarian divide: from the Ballybeen and Shankill groups on the one hand, to Dock Ward, Tongue in Cheek (from the Ardoyne), and Stone Chair from in or around the Catholic enclave of Short Strand. Says Maureen Harkin, a stalwart both of CAF and the Ballybeen group, "We started talking about it a couple of years ago, but I don't think it could ever have happened up until now."
Then there is the sheer scale and complexity of the production, with a cast and crew of about 50, and the idea of taking promenade theatre to its extremes. Audiences are shuttled by bus between a couple of working class houses - one Protestant (the bride's), one Catholic (the groom's); through a rather unorthodox ceremony in the non-subscribing Presbyterian Church on Rosemary Street, where its progressive-minded minister, Nigel Playfair, wishes to turn the old meeting hall into a more civic space; and onto the grand finale of the Wedding Reception in the new pub-barn on the Lagan Waterfront, The Edge (or for a couple of dates during the run, the nearby Hilton).
For sheer verite, it will be interesting to move from the "Protestant House" in Madrid Street in East Belfast (kindly provided by the Housing Executive), across the sobering "interface" of the sectarian dividing line in the middle of the street. It's a narrow zone of blackened, boarded-up houses, and literally a stone's throw away from Beachfield Street in the Short Strand, where "the Catholic House" will be loaned out by a relative of one of the CAF people. As a matter of course, consultations were held with representatives of local paramilitary groups to get a quiet goahead for the project.
The idea here is a fly-on-the-wall docudrama whereby the audience files - in groups of 12 - through three "simultaneous" scenes in each house (living room, kitchen, bedroom) which sketch out the shades of opinion about these awkward - but highly common - "dolly-mixture" marriages.
The households are mirror images of each other - frazzled, wedding-morning, family and friends, expressing either defiant enthusiasm or fretful misgivings at the union; while each family has an ex-prisoner and former paramilitary poking out of the closet.
To add to the ironic complexity: on the Catholic side, the groom's stepfather is a Protestant. Some of the Catholic women told me there were far more mixed marriages in the Catholic Short Strand area than in the outlying Protestant areas. While Maureen Harkin, a Protestant, argued that point strongly, she certainly agreed that it was the women that ventured out of the Catholic ghetto to shops, post-offices, dole offices, dentists and doctors - the men would have been too much at risk. "Anyway," as one Catholic woman ruefully observed: "men didn't tend to go to doctors much".
Oh yes, this is community drama: the cast members are mostly working class locals, and the work came out of intensively devised workshops. Initially, these were broken up between Protestants and Catholics (and interestingly most, but not all, of the cast play characters of their own religion). Eventually, they all went to joint workshops away in Enniskillen, where one of their first psychodramatic exercises was to get up alone and howl the most bigoted things they could think of across at the other side. According to many, it certainly broke the ice.
Other research involved exhaustive interviews with local people. The transcipts would break your heart - often with laughter, it has to be said, as in the case of the doughty nonagenarian, Sarah Doherty with her tales of the old bare-knuckle boxers in the chapel fields, like Machine Gun McKenzie and Hard Hitting Christian Buckets Megahey.
Eventually, a creative panel/committee argued out the play's structure and even characters, and two writers were brought in: Martin Lynch and Marie Jones, neither of them strangers to either the professional or community stage.
Finally rehearsal rosters were carved up: the four sections directed, respectively, by Tinderbox's Stephen Wright, CAF's Jo Egan, Michael Poynor of Ulster Youth Theatre and Gerri Moriarty - although with multifarious other commitments between family and work, drawing all the actors together was often a very hairy affair.
WHEN I chanced into them, the "Catholic household" was rehearsing one evening in the "Protestant House" in 179 Madrid Street up near Templemore Avenue. Throughout the evening, two women stood at the door of a house opposite, just keeping an eye. And at one stage, kids from either end started lobbing sectarian taunts at each other, adding a nervily humorous edge to the proceedings.
The Catholic women I spoke to, who grew up in nearby Short Strand, described the crazy claustrophobia of the tiny enclave within greater, predominantly Protestant East Belfast: in the past, they were barricaded into their homes on the 12th by British soldiers, while huge walls and screens were erected around the estates. There were death threats, one of which was issued very recently - bringing the seriousness of the project into sharp relief.
Meanwhile Maureen Harkin, who originally grew up just across the Newtownards Road, remembers the early days of the Troubles when, before people were moved out en masse to estates to the east, there were open gunbattles between the two communities, the IRA strafing Protestant streets with machine gun fire.
It takes enormous courage to try to defuse the awful intensity of such a backdrop, but the sheer therapeutic intensity of the theatrical process has impressed many of the participants. One young woman, whose father was killed by the loyalist paramilitaries a decade ago, described the experience as bringing out so much more in her than she ever got from counselling or encounter groups.
The Wedding Play could be described as propaganda - peace propaganda. The young couple are said to have met, and fallen in love, at the U2 gig in the Waterfront where Hume and Trimble shook hands in front of Bono. And as the wedding reception wears on, the mixed-marriage becomes very much a comic-poignant metaphor for the peace process itself.
But the script was arrived at by painfully democratic means, with dialogue, storylines and characters hotly argued and vetoed at every step, from every side. It couldn't have been pleasant for writer Martin Lynch when one guy from the Falls, who came in late to the production, adamantly demanded that his character be entirely rewritten. He now plays a glowering, screwed up, ex-prisoner, forced to scrounge fags and money from all around him, and to confront a few uncomfortable new realities.
Maureen Harkin, who would see herself as an Ulsterwoman rather than Irish, admitted that: "Protestants would definitely feel that their culture is being threatened, that everything we were brought up to believe in is suddenly not the case. That's why I've always seen community drama as a definite way forward."
Mindful of the fact that their keenest critics may be their nearest neighbours - who will step curiously across the religious divide to see what their Catholic/Protestant neighbours are thinking and saying - the CAF people are confident that The Wedding will also provide a sharp education for those visitors into the neighbourhood, or indeed the city.
Fridays and Saturdays only - November 5th, 6th, 12th, 13th, 19th, 20th, 26th and 27th. Audience congregates at CAF, 15 Church Street, Belfast at 1.40 p.m., opposite St. Anne's Cathedral. The wedding reception ends at approximately 6 p.m.
