TRAGEDIES tend to be written at very specific times and in very particular places. To write one, you need to be able to draw on a society that is caught between two worlds. You need the chance imagine people who are so divided within themselves between one world and the other that whatever they do will be wrong.
In the late 1950s and the 1960s, the Republic was such a place at such a time, and its theatre produced some remarkable tragedies. Gary Mitchell's In A Little World Of Our Own at the Peacock suggests that contemporary Northern Ireland may offer the same possibilities.
Tragedy, oddly enough, seldom emerges from utterly bleak circumstances. If there is no change and no hope - as in Northern Ireland for most of the last 30 years - you can get plays that are grim, sad and violent. But you can't get the tragic tension, the idea that there are credible grounds for hope that will, in the course of the action, be blighted. In that sense, Gary Mitchell's play, though it is dark and sombre, is a tentative sign that something has changed. The dashing of hopes that it enacts implies at least that there was in the first place some possibility of hopes being fulfilled.
This is, in other words, very much a play of the peace process, of a time when people have been stretched between hope and despair, between longing and revulsion. Like the current return to violence, its action is all the more terrible because an alternative is just about imaginable. The opening exchanges of the play create a specific political context: tension within the UDA about whether to follow a path towards peace and politics or whether to accept, as the hardman brother Ray (Stuart Graham) does, that "the world is a violent place".
The play is set in the Protestant Rathcoole estate in north Belfast, and, declaring its tragic intentions, follows the classical unities - a single action (the destruction of three brothers, played out in a single place (the garish sitting room of their house), over a single day. As in a Greek tragedy, all of the violent evens - beating, rape, murder - take place off stage. And one character, Walter (superbly played by for Roddy), acts as both Chorus (filling in off stage details, prompting the action, playing out the alternatives) and Messenger, bringing word to and from the paramilitary leadership.
The play never leaves this political context, and at one level it is almost an allegory of paramilitarism, in which the family stands for the tribe. The action is driven by forces that are felt in the public world as well as the private - the resort to irrational violence that comes into play when the survival of the family is threatened, the scapegoating of a "Taig" for the family's own sins.
The strength of the writing, though, is that this political division is reflected within the family, not through abstract argument, but through a struggle over who is to look - after the mentally disabled brother Richard (the excellent Marc O Shea). Is he to go to a new house with Gordon (Sean Kearns) and his God fearing wife to be (Andrea Irvine) thus becoming part of a new, respectable future in which the past is left behind? Or is he to stay with Ray, who, in spite of his violent outlook, treats him with tenderness and respect?
Mitchell shows great skill in turning what might have been a rather mechanical opposition into a complex interaction: the "bad" Ray is also intelligent and loving; the "good" Gordon is priggish and weak. As in a Tom Murphy play, there is a sense that the two together might make one decent human being. But, split as they are, dreams of decency are doomed to away, slowly at first, and then in an avalanche of disaster. By the end, everything - Ray's power, Richard's innocence, Gordon's hopes for a normal life - is in ruins.
Conall Morrison's production is terrific: very well cast, perfectly paced, always on edge but never hysterical or bathetic. The only misjudgment is the decision to go for a naturalistic set, well designed by Kathy Strachan, in which the fussy furniture sits oddly with the classical form and the Old Testament resonances that echo through the play as the family's fate comes to resemble a distorted echo of Abraham and Isaac. A starker, less literal, setting would have been riskier - and there are plenty of risks associated with a play like this anyway - but it right also have taken away the nagging feeling that the charges are not quite big enough to operate on a truly tragic scale.
This is nonetheless, an utterly compelling piece of theatre and, for all the bleakness of the action, an oddly hopeful one. If it is true that terrible events can only really be seen when they are over, then the relentlessness of Gary Mitchell's gaze and the quality of his vision suggests that his play may in its own way mark a beginning of the end.
