Gary Mitchell: ‘I physically went into hiding because of the terror I saw in my children’s eyes’

On the night of March 15th, 1999, outside the Royal Court Theatre in London, a group of American tourists were discussing the play they had just seen. “I didn’t much care for it,” said one. “Not my idea of Irishness.”

“I preferred The Weir,” said another. Heads nodded in agreement. “Oh yeah, The Weir. Great play.”

They had emerged from Mick Gordon’s award-winning production of Trust, another fearless, hard-hitting portrayal of Northern loyalist culture by Gary Mitchell, the Belfast playwright who, at the time, was writer-in-residence at the UK National Theatre, in London. His appointment had been widely hailed as a singular achievement for a young writer who grew up and, for a number of years, continued to live in the loyalist estate of Rathcoole, an area he once described as the hardlands.

The sad irony of the Americans’ reactions was that on that very day, Rosemary Nelson, a prominent Northern Ireland solicitor, had been killed by a car bomb outside her home in Lurgan, Co Armagh. A loyalist paramilitary group calling itself the Red Hand Defenders had claimed responsibility. It was a stark reminder that Mitchell’s plays were not merely shock-inducing fiction but unflinching commentaries, inspired by real events emanating from a world he knew very well.

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Twenty-four years later, inside the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, where his latest play, Burnt Out, has been in rehearsal, Mitchell concedes that his uncompromising version of Irishness has never been everyone’s cup of tea. “Yeah, they’re still equally unpopular,” he says, a rueful grin breaking out across his face.

Mitchell knows all too well what it means to be popular, and unpopular. By the turn of the millennium he had won several prestigious awards and had plays running simultaneously in London, Dublin and New York. He was described in one newspaper article in 2005 as “one of the most talked about voices in European theatre ... whose political thrillers have arguably made him Northern Ireland’s greatest playwright”.

But that same year those plays made him a target for paramilitary thugs, who attacked his home, petrol-bombed his car and threatened his family.

“We lived in fear for a long time,” says Mitchell. “I physically went into hiding, because of the terror I saw in my children’s eyes. And I stopped writing. But during that time I discovered that I couldn’t do anything else, so I thought that maybe a way back was by writing comedies. I think I was probably hiding my fears and anxieties behind comedy, while working to support my family. Oddly, it was RTÉ radio drama that rebooted my career and gave me the confidence to get back into the theatre. But I didn’t find comedy particularly satisfying, although I do enjoy the reactions of the audience, the laughter.”

Burnt Out is a psychological thriller, a genre that returns Mitchell to familiar dramatic territory. It’s his first play at the Lyric since the football comedy Smiley, in 2016, and was to have been produced before the pandemic hit. In the interim the Lyric produced an audio version, directed by Dan Gordon. On hearing it performed, Mitchell felt that more work was required on the script; to his ears it sounded unfinished. Now, he says, it feels complete.

Its setting is the living room of an aspirational young Belfast couple called Cheryl and Michael, who both come from mainly Protestant, working-class areas of the city. They’ve done well and have just bought a house in a leafy suburb. Michael is a primary-school teacher who is in line for a vice-principal’s post, while Cheryl owns a beauty salon.

“They are doing so well,” says Mitchell, tongue-in-cheek. “Then Michael has this bright idea to have a child. Cheryl doesn’t want to bring a child into the world, because it would ruin their perfect life and perfect house. We learn that they have left their families behind. In their minds, they are lower-class people, who have crumbs on the carpet and nappies on the kitchen table. He’s convinced that now is the perfect time to start a family. She warns him against saying such a thing, as it will open them up to every evil under the sun.

“Then Michael’s brother Donnie arrives at their door, bearing troubling news. A bonfire is to be built in the field opposite their house. Nobody told them. I did that myself. We didn’t stay, but not because of the bonfire.”

That throwaway final line is vintage Mitchell, withholding the dramatic dynamite until the end. In conversation, it’s clear he still bears the scars of the intimidation to which he and his family were subjected, but, in an interview, two years later, he declared his defiance: “They attacked my family because of what they’d heard about my plays, but if they think their actions will create an impotence in my work, they are sadly mistaken. My weapons are not baseball bats and petrol, they are words, and I have an abundance of them.”

That abundance of words continues to flow, albeit in a new domestic and historical context. Mitchell explains how the bonfire will prove to be unexpectedly problematic for the couple, on a number of levels. “The building of the bonfire leads into an investigation of the family, where they’ve come from, the fact that these two are social climbers. They desperately want to be middle class. They speak nicely, they don’t swear at each other, they play by the rules, there’s no violence – they’ve left that behind. But when the brother comes in, he brings it all with him.

“We learn that their mother, a typical Rathcoole matriarch, who knows everything that’s going on, has sent him to make sure the golden boy is okay, that nobody from that bonfire will upset her child. Michael is the youngest of a large family, born in unusual circumstances. His siblings have been tasked with working hard to send their little brother to grammar school. In Donnie’s view, Michael owes his success to him – and he’s here to collect.”

Bonfires have become a contentious issue within loyalist communities, where a commonly held fear is that opposition to them is designed to chip away at their Protestant culture. Mitchell has a typically individualistic take on the situation.

“In my plays I draw on experiences from within my own community. I create characters that allow me to tell a story, which I think is important. I wouldn’t want to oversell my talent or this play, but I do think a conversation needs to start about what Protestant culture actually is.

“We’ve identified that Protestantism is fragmented. We all know that. ‘Protestant’ is a term we shouldn’t even use any more, because it doesn’t mean anything. What I’m talking about is what you might call the ‘underclass’ – the jobless, the people who feel abandoned, forsaken, left behind.

“This is the case the world over. In Mississippi Burning, Gene Hackman’s character says, ‘If you’re not better than a black man, who are you better than?’ That resonates with me because I grew up in a world where we were told, at least you’re a Protestant, because they are better than Catholics. But in recent years, I see that Catholics are doing better than Protestants. Then the immigrants show up and the Protestants at least feel better than somebody. It’s all about control.

“The rich own the pie, and they cut out a tiny piece of it and give it to the Protestants. Then they tell them the Catholics are trying to steal that wee piece of pie, so the Protestants go all out to defend it. Meanwhile, the rich are eating the entire pie, every day. It’s unbelievable that we just accept this. There are people who have the money to fly to the moon and others who can’t afford the bus fare into Belfast. So when all you have is that wee, tiny crumb of pie, you fight to protect it.

“The bonfire is part of the pie, and they say, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll protect you and your right to have your bonfire.’ You spend so much energy saying ‘Thank you very much for allowing us to have this bonfire’ that, by now, you’re distracted from the pie. Until the day comes when poor Protestants and poor Catholics come together and ask why we are we allowing this to continue; you can build all the bonfires you want and nothing will change.”

The conversation he wants to open up is not about the rights and wrongs of bonfires. He maintains that the idea of a bonfire being a Protestant thing is nonsense, but the reality is that it causes upset and division within communities.

“Again, we see working-class Protestants fighting other working-class Protestants about who’s in charge of the bonfire, who’s collecting the wood, who wants the bonfire, who’s complaining about the bonfire ... and that’s the point. It’s all a distraction. You have to stop fighting about it.”

Mitchell is plainly delighted to be back at the Lyric, working alongside the director Jimmy Fay and the cast and production team, doing what he does best, making an audience laugh, then, abruptly, stopping the laughter as a chilling reality kicks in.

“I find life and human beings absurd, ridiculous and, ultimately, hideous,” he says. “The pandemic was a real downer for me. With so much death and suffering around, I became deeply aware of my own mortality – and my own morality. I thought, ‘I haven’t done enough good in the world. I haven’t stood up. I haven’t told people what I have observed. It’s time I did.’ And I think this is the start. I hope so, anyway.”

Burnt Out is at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, from Saturday, October 7th, to Saturday, November 4th, as the opening event of Belfast International Arts Festival