Looking for forgiveness in a Creggan graveyard

Adrian Dunbar has a weight of history to deal with in directing Frank McGuinness's Carthaginians, but he hopes the play can offer some healing too, writes JANE COYLE

DERRY, ENNISKILLEN, Omagh. For all the wrong reasons, these town names have acquired semi-iconic status in the troubled history of the past four decades or so. It is difficult to believe that 40 years have passed since Bloody Sunday in Derry, an anniversary about to be commemorated by a new production of Carthaginians, Frank McGuinness's audacious dramatic response to that dark day. The producing venue is the Millennium Forum, the theatre built into the original city walls 10 years ago, in a process of cultural and social regeneration, which has resulted in Derry being selected as the first UK City of Culture in 2013.

The production will be directed by Adrian Dunbar, who is a native of Enniskillen, the Fermanagh town that experienced its own horrors in November 1987, when an IRA bomb exploded at the Remembrance Day ceremony at the town’s war memorial, killing 11 people. He is acutely aware of the shared resonance conveyed by the play and by their significance to those left behind to pick up the pieces.

“All those things are in your mind when you do this play,” he says. “What I’m hoping to do with it is, I think, what Frank was hoping to do, which is that if we can find out the truth and be honest about all these things, there is a possibility for healing to happen.

“What drives the play is the death of a child and a woman who’s desperate for her daughter to come back. That’s the hardest thing for any parent to bear and gives the play its universal quality.

“A little while ago I went to a lecture Fergal Keane was giving about a Holocaust survivor. I became aware, because I have done some work in this area, of how people, who are united in a collective grief, carry a lot of guilt about surviving. While we can contextualise everything and create the means for healing, we ourselves can’t forgive what happened because only someone who was there that day, who understands it, can forgive.

“Here are a bunch of people, who have survived Bloody Sunday, and that’s who the play is written for. It’s a sort of healing message to them, that they have to forgive each other. And these messages are hidden in this mad, abstract world that Frank has created in the Creggan graveyard.”

Within that “mad world”, McGuinness has gathered together a colourful band of brothers and sisters, larger-than-life characters, each of whom has acquired an individual method of coping with the disaster that has devastated their lives. As an actor and director, Dunbar recognises the enormous challenge presented to the cast, many of whom are coming to the play and, indeed, the period for the first time.

“All the characters are really interesting, really complicated,” he says. “There are no stereotypes on stage. That’s what makes the play so exciting – the performances that Frank has written, which offer the actors so many possibilities. Within what is, yes, a mad play, there are also layers and layers of understanding and what becomes intriguing for us as an audience is to see the connections coming together and falling apart and coming together again amongst these people, who are in the middle of it, trying to make sense of it all.

“A lot of the cast don’t really have any understanding at all of the period and you have to explain some of the most basic things about it.

“For example, the startling nature of the television and media coverage of Bloody Sunday and the impact it had across the world. People in Paris were seeing it on the news the next day; the day after that, there were questions asked in the Spanish parliament; and the day after that it was all over the US and beyond. It’s hard for these young actors, living in this instantaneous world, to imagine how defining a moment it was. You can go to other places in the world and people will remember that moment as being the spark that set off what became known as the Troubles in Ireland, the Battle of the Bogside.”

More recently, Derry people experienced another defining moment, in the unexpected shape of a formal apology for Bloody Sunday by the British Prime Minister David Cameron, beamed live to a massed crowd in Guildhall Square. It was, in itself, a moment of high drama.

“Yes, there are a lot of things conspiring, anniversaries and so on, right now,” says Dunbar. “You do sometimes get a feeling when you’re doing things that the timing is right. That wasn’t in your mind when you decided to do it, but then it suddenly seems to take on more and more significance. It’s brilliant to be doing this play at this time and here. The more I read it, the more inspired I become by it and that’s the mark of a really great piece. The play is powerful and it’s up to us to present it and enhance it and make it the sort of healing experience I think it can be.”

Carthaginians

is at the Burnavon Theatre, Cookstown tomorrow, and then travels to Dublin as part of a national tour. See

[ millenniumforum.co.uk ]

for details