Years ago, before my broad mind and narrow waist had changed places and I was a young actor, I went to Northern Ireland on tour. As we entered Belfast our company bus was flagged down by soldiers with guns. They entered the bus and did a search; they were brusque, emotionless . they were scary. Finding no danger in our fake theatrical props they left. It made huge impression on me. As a young kid in the seventies I had barely taken in the news reports from "across the water. It was nothing to do with me, didnt impinge on my life. Even when the IRA bombed the mainland it didnt bring it home. That incident on the bus made it real to me. The people of The North or Northern Ireland (never has semantics been more potentially lethal than on this issue) had been living in fear of years. The Chronicles of Long Kesh now brings home to an audience not only this fear, but the complexity of human motivation and desire, and effectively dares its audience to re-examine the way it judges life is more complicated than good people and bad people.Written by Martin Lynch, Greenshoot productions have take one of the most shameful episodes in recent British history and brought it to life with pathos, wit, humour, and, believe it or not, songs. In 1971 the British government, panicking about the escalation of violence across the water, introduced internment, that is imprisonment without trial (thus making the play topical now as we come out of the Guantanamo era). Some of those arrested were undoubtedly violent men, but many were innocent. Freddie (superbly played by Billy Clarke) addresses us directly. He tosses a coin as a young man to see whether he should join the prison service, and it turns out to be heads . he loses. Hes our narrator for the long journey through the years and we watch him grown old and his life disintegrate as the barbaric regime takes its toll on prisoner and guard alike.The setting is simple several black blocks and rostra of various shapes and sizes are utilised and moved to form different rooms, cells, beds. This leaves space for the six performers to bring Lynchs extraordinary text to life. The stage teems with a myriad of characters, Protestant and Catholic, and its a real tribute to the troupe that we are never confused about who is who, or on which side they are. They take us through the long and ignoble history of this hellhole with humour and truth. Lynch and his co director Lisa May drew on anecdotal evidence, but also interviewed over thirty prisoners as well as guards and others. Consequently all this has a ring of truth, not least because we are aware that these actors all lived through The Troubles themselves.Special mention should go to fight director Paul Burke. The violence (of which there is much) is stylised but still shocking. Musical director Paul Boyd has done great work too, for one of the more surreal touches of this piece is that it has a slew of Tamla Motown songs performed by the inmates. This posits the show in the right time frame, but also adds often touching or humorous irony.Still, its hard to keep singing when you are deprived of your liberty and you have no release date. These men, turn their bodies into political weapons, first with the notorious dirty protest which involved smearing themselves and their cells with their own excrement, and then with the lethal hunger strike which did much to turn public opinion. All of this is handled with great skill by writer and performer alike, the dirty protest even drawing laughs when one inmate describes his art work as a Van Gough.No doubt many of the inmates of Long Kesh (or The Maze as it became known in 1976) were not very nice people some were undoubtedly in love with violence for its own sake, some were arguably just evil. But what this piece does is show us the human stories behind the news headlines. Another Celt, Rabbie Burns, penned the extraordinary simple truism Mans inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn. When you watch some of the moments in this piece, especially the incredibly rousing curtain at the end of Act One when the seemingly defeated and broken prisoners one by one rise from the savage beatings they have just received to fill the prison with an aria of defiant and beautiful noise one realises that man also has the potential to rise above anything. To die for a cause, to die for a friend, to die for a complete stranger in the name of an ideal. It lifts us above the animals, and has been used as argument by some for the existence of God, the same god that BOTH sides in this conflict worshiped. In a world still riven by fundamentalism of all kinds, it's worth hanging on to the goodness and bravery we as a tribe are also capable of, and with courageous, insightful, celebratory theatre like this who needs religion.Stunning.
