A tree root is being hung from the ceiling of Belfast's old Northern Bank, dripping crumbs of dirt on to the pale lino tiles below. In the echoing stucco hall beyond, Tinderbox Theatre Company's artistic director, Simon Magill, is framed by a pair of yawning iron gates as he talks to a television crew.
It's the day of the first preview of No Place Like Home, a highlight of the Belfast Festival programme from the company who produced last year's show-stopper, Convictions. For all that, No Place Like Home doesn't even come close to being the day's big story in Belfast, a city alive to the news that the IRA had put a substantial amount of arms beyond use.
Magill and company manager Eamon Quinn look at the newspaper headlines and agree they don't mind being upstaged by decommissioning, but it seems a good time to ask about the challenges of creating politically engaged theatre in a place where events on the street can be more dramatic than anything you put on stage. No Place Like Home, is inspired by the wave of displacement in Belfast, which saw some 60,000 people shunted out of their homes by threats, burnings and intimidation between 1969 and 1974. Yet this is not a fossilised piece of history; just 10 minutes down the road, the parents are gathering at Alliance Avenue getting ready for the daily walk to Holy Cross school. Sectarian intimidation is a brutally monotonous occurrence in Belfast.
"What's been exciting is the immediacy of it," says Magill, who directed the piece. "There is that discussion of how can theatre present conflict while conflict is going on all around it, when the conflict itself is bigger than what you're presenting. This is an attempt to try to explore that. It's a new departure for a lot of us in terms of form and style and content."
Tinderbox has always been adventurous in its productions - last year's Convictions had seven playwrights and was staged in the old Crumlin Road Courthouse - but this piece has left the confines of dramatic narrative altogether. Drawing on the contributions of writers, designers, artists, academics and journalists, No Place Like Home is a devised piece with a base text by playwright Owen McCafferty. After months of workshops and rehearsals, the company claims the production is as much about composer Conor Mitchell's score and the installations of visual artist Amanda Montgomery as it is about the five performers and the taped-out stage.
"One of the things I knew it couldn't be was a naturalistic play," says Magill decisively. "I felt it wouldn't give the scale, magnitude, colour or range of emotions, whereas a devised physical piece might be able to express this . . .
"We found that, any time we tried to put it in any kind of domestic or naturalistic setting, it just didn't work. For example, when we set up suitcases to make a naturalistic place and then wrecked it, we would just say, 'Oh right, they're wrecking it'. But if the scene was two people walking into that wrecked place, that was much, much more interesting."
Those involved in the piece all had different reactions to the notion of displacement, and their responses have made their mark on the performance. For designer Marcus Costello, the key was movement, because "the thing about displacement is that, once you are gone from your home, you are gone forever, and until you get to your next home, you can't get that feeling of comfort".
To this end, he created a massive set of gates through which the audience must walk, only to see them close behind them so they are "held in a displaced state". Visual artist Montgomery plucked out "the human element, the intimacies that are lost" for her installation in the improvised foyer. Those suspended tree roots press home the notion of a people uprooted, while scrolls of acetate bear a wallpaper design which proves to be an obsessively neat rendering of the names and addresses of the displaced.
In the old bank vault, the doors of the safe lie ajar, revealing safety deposit boxes holding bricks screen-printed with scraps of photographs - a child wandering in the rubble of her home, the end gable of a house. These tie in with a line from McCafferty's text - "My identity, what is it? Belfast Man. We should all know what that means, it's written into every brick" - but were also prompted by the former bank chosen by Tinderbox for the performance. While Magill and his team insist that the piece is not actually site-specific, it's obvious that they're highly pleased with the venue, despite the practical problems it has thrown up. The acoustics are a nightmare, while the logistics of creating a theatre space in a listed building where you can't even drill into a wall have been causing Costello sleepless nights.
Yet Magill reels off the various historical events that have taken place in the building - the trial of 1798 rebel, Henry Joy McCracken; the 1792 Belfast Harp Festival - during its various incarnations as assembly rooms, stock exchange and lastly, bank: "Belfast grew up here."
Its geographical location is perhaps even more important. "We felt it was important to present this play in the centre of town, which, because of the conflict here, empties at night," says Magill, who once again approached the property developers who own both the Crumlin Road Courthouse and the old bank.
"It really was a ghost town with security fences everywhere. That's changing, but more so on the periphery. So when we were presenting this play about displacement, it felt important to come back into the city centre."
Yet for all the talk of place and displacement, No Place Like Home is a piece of theatre without place, where names such as Baghdad and Beijing are tossed like confetti into a dramatic landscape that bears a closer resemblance to Beckett's wastelands than it does to contemporary Belfast.
Magill is confident that the piece remains firmly rooted in Belfast, nevertheless, by virtue of how, rather than what, is said. "There's a muscularity about Owen's text and the Belfast vernacular that I like . . . It has a context of itself, the accent - you only have to ask for a cup of tea in England, and they think you're threatening them."
This displacement of place itself has a wider political purpose, too. While developing the piece, the company looked at the experiences of Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda, Nazi Germany and, most recently, Afghanistan; the end result is a meditation on displacement that prompts more questions than it answers.
"We're trying to provoke in people the reaction they would have to refugees coming into Ireland. Through an extensive outreach programme, the piece will be seen by over 400 young people who will do workshops with Tinderbox's source material and perform in the space, and the programme is a hefty production notebook which includes testimonies, analysis by social historian Roisin Higgins and contemporary newspaper reports.
"One of the things we're keen to try to get into is the cyclical nature of this," says Magill, who freely admits he is happiest directing work with a political and social relevance. "It keeps going on; it happens all the time . . . The veneer of the peace process is wafer thin, and we could easily go back into it again. If there's anything that comes out of our piece, it's that we've got to try and prevent that."
No Place Like Home runs until November 17th at the Northern Bank Building, Waring Street, Belfast, at 8 p.m. It will be reviewed by Fintan O'Toole in Friday's Arts page.
