Why the Troubles are virgin artistic territory

CULTURE SHOCKThe years after the end of a conflict tend to produce the best dramatic explorations of it - but so far, the potential of the North remains untapped

IN A STRIKING essay in Fortnight magazine, the brilliant journalist and chronicler Malachi O'Doherty suggests an exam question for history papers: "Compare and contrast the periods of wilful culture-blindness in Dublin and Belfast in the early 1960s and at the end of the peace process." He draws a provocative parallel between culture in Northern Ireland as it is now and as it was in the immediate run-up to the Troubles.

He cites in particular Sam Thompson's ground-breaking, eerily prophetic 1960 play about sectarianism in the shipyard, Over The Bridge. The Group Theatre pulled it because the board considered it "offensive".

"If," O'Doherty asks, "Sam Thomson was writing now about sectarian attitudes and nascent violence in working-class society, would his play have any better chance of being performed now than it had then?" Given the scale of the coverage of the 10th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement, it may seem strange to argue that the Troubles is somehow a neglected theme. With another significant anniversary on the way - in October it will be 40 years since what is generally taken to be the start of the Troubles - any casual consumer of the mainstream media might be forgiven for being sceptical at the notion that the conflict is under-represented.

But O'Doherty's point is about cultural representation and, in particular, about the use of drama and fiction to explore both what happened and where it leaves us.

From the South, he cites a recent discussion on RTÉ's The View in which David Park's novel The Truth Commissioner was under review. Gerry Stembridge, one of the most politically aware writers and directors in the Republic, remarked that he had never heard of Park (author of five previous, highly acclaimed novels) and didn't read books about the Troubles. In the North and Britain, O'Doherty claims, "BBC drama departments are instructing producers not to submit ideas about the Troubles. A very senior producer said that he would love to do a play about spies inside paramilitary organisations but that he would never get it accepted." This wilful neglect is remarkable in many ways. One is that it is usually the years after the end of a conflict that tend to produce the best dramatic explorations of it. In the heat of battle, there is too much propaganda, and too little distance, for artistic reflection to function effectively. The greatest films on wars - Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers and Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now - were produced, respectively, four years after the end of the Algerian war and four years after the end of the Vietnam war. Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front came out 11 years after the end of the first World War, of which it is the quintessential representation. The best dramatic film on the Bosnian war so far, Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land came out in 2001, six years after the conflict finished.

On this rough time-scale, therefore, one might expect the current period to be one in which the definitive Troubles dramas are emerging. It might be objected that the Troubles simply don't have the epic sweep, the sheer horrific scale, of Algeria or Vietnam or Bosnia. This is certainly true and it is no harm to remind ourselves that in relation to 20th century wars, this was a squalid little brawl. But the very intimacy of the conflict, the up-close-and-personal way it unfolded, surely makes it perfect for drama. And the way it ended, with secret negotiations, massive moral compromises and the transition of terrorists into mainstream politicians is inherently dramatic. The ambiguities on which tragedy has been built since the time of the Greeks are present in abundance in a society where so many people got away with murder, where respected leaders have blood on their hands, where "good cops" colluded with psychopaths, and where the bereaved have to meet the killers on the streets. If you can't find drama in a family waiting on a beach while diggers hunt for the remains of their "disappeared" mother, you're in the wrong game.

So why the reluctance to tap this dramatic potential? Boredom is certainly a factor: the working-out of the Belfast Agreement has been so tedious that the extraordinary nature of what happened has been flattened under the weight of platitudes, special pleading and self-absorption. There is also a deliberate amnesia, a feeling that were the stone to be turned over, too many worms might crawl out. And there is an awkward disconnection between the realities of Northern Ireland - that terrorists have to be spoken to, and that violence gets you noticed - and the official rhetoric of the "war on terror".

But this very awkwardness is precisely why we need films, plays and novels. There is emotional and psychological business that is not merely unfinished but that the political system cannot finish. The peace process has been all about, in that ridiculous cliché, "putting the past behind us". Even the memory of the dead is fraught with division and danger. Fictions can tell truths that the carefully constructed political reality must occlude. If there are few better contexts for great drama, there are also few societies that need it so much.