A shortage of drama

IT HAS already happened land if we took enough notice of the outside world over the last couple of days to even turn on the radio, we know how it turned out. The union of Catholic and Dissenter in the cause of liberty and equality forged by the United Irishmen under Henry Joy Mc Cracken in the north, was brief indeed. So Stewart Parker's Northern Star is careering towards a fixed point from the start.

It could be argued that we know what happened at the Somme, for instance, or we know what happened to the Gaelic Order, and yet Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme and Translations keep their tension. In fact, these plays uncover (or create) new material and have a new message. Although Parker's play, presented for the festival by Rough Magic and directed by Lynne Parker, is eerily relevant to recent times, as brutal sectananism has run riot in the north, it tells us very little we didn't know.

As Henry Joy Mc Cracken lurches through his past on his last night with his lover and child on Cavehill, there is a very real sense that this is Stewart Parker we are seeing before us, trying, with honesty and courage, to weave a story in which he can believe, as a Belfast Protestant. Mc Cracken fails, and so does Parker, because where there is not hatred there is myth, and so Northern Star moves through a series of (often quite hilarious) parodies of Irish dramatists, from Boucicault to Beckett.

In the last few minutes of the play, Mc Cracken stumbles on the importance of the local, realising that what he really cares about is the right of to live out their lives fear in the place they home. In this the play presages Mc Guinness's Observe The Sons Of Ulster, moves into new territory mapped put, it seems, in imagination.

Parker's direction in aver, split level set by "Blaithin Sheerin, is too faithful to the dominant naturalism of the play it is a shame for instance, that she does not bring her trump card, an enormous Lambeg drum, out of the shadows until the end. Stuart Graham has a difficult time as Mc Cracken, who is play acting so much of the time, but he fails to make much of the man behind the mask. Kathy Downes is strong as his Nora Clitheroe style lover and Ali White as his revolutionary sister, showing Sheerin's costuming talent to the full in a flowing, nipped under the bust dress, which shouted Liherte and all that. The combined talents of Miche Doherty, Sean Kearns, Darragh Kelly and Gerard O'Hare pack a powerful comic punch in incidental parts, and their different heights and sizes are used mischievously, with a Felliniesque eye, by Lynne Parker.

There is fun, then, there is interest, but there simply isn't enough drama.