There is a scene in Gary Mitchell's raw and tender play, Marching On, which tells us more about what is happening at Drumcree this week than all the images on television.
It is the eve of the Twelfth of July in a loyalist housing estate in North Belfast. Christopher is a policeman. He was reared by churchgoing, law-abiding parents to accept his responsibilities to his family and the broader unionist community. That is why he joined the RUC. He has his own fearful memories of violence and keeps his gun close to him at all times.
The war was the easy part. Now he finds himself in a situation where he has to police his own kith and kin on the streets. His elderly father - a decent, God-fearing Orangeman - insists on taking part in a "dignified" protest against the re-routing of the annual parade. His teenage son is, at the very least, flirting with loyalist paramilitaries. The old, familiar world has been turned upside down. And for what? A few yards of road about which nobody outside Northern Ireland gives a toss.
When his play opened at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast last month, Gary Mitchell wrote in this newspaper about his urgent need to present his own community on the stage. He had listened to so many people in so many pubs, complaining that the Protestant working class had never had a fair hearing, that the media conspired "to make us look like bunch of unreasonable, irrational, bigoted half-wits".
In a series of passionate and bleakly funny plays, Mitchell has probed the sense of communal defeat, bewilderment and anger that lies behind so much of the violence which we see each night at Drumcree. Like Sean O'Casey's, his characters show us how ordinary people cope - or fail to cope - with the trauma of a civil conflict over which they have no control. The final scene of Marching On, where father and son, both in tears, are still unable to communicate with each other, is a desolating picture of loss and loneliness.
Mitchell has written of his community's lack of skills - and perhaps even of interest - in presenting its story to a wider world. This has been very evident in recent days at Drumcree. How could the Orange Order have allowed Johnny Adair and the UFF, the organisation responsible for some of the most vicious attacks on innocent Catholics, within a hundred miles of Drumcree?
Their presence, together with that of the LVF, might have been designed to alienate sympathy in the broader unionist community, which deeply resents seeing the adjective, Protestant, linked to this kind of thing.
The television images of Drumcree, however shocking, must not stop the rest of us from trying to understand the deeper emotions that underlie the protest. The hardline Orange leader who compared the loyalist community to a "wounded lion" was probably a bit over the top, but he was close to the mark when he said that many of the ordinary, working-class Protestants at Portadown felt "abandoned".
David Trimble and a large section of middle-class unionism have accepted that the old days have gone forever. The unionist hegemony has been broken into small pieces. They have looked at the figures and know that time is on the side of the nationalist community. An internal research document drawn up for the UUP traces the decline in the unionist vote and argues that unionists could be in a minority in the Assembly within 10 years. "In fact, we may be grateful for mandatory power-sharing," the author comments tersely.
Against this background, David Trimble and his colleagues negotiated the best possible deal to protect the interests of the unionist community. In the Belfast Agreement, Irish nationalism agreed to the principle of majority consent in order to achieve a political settlement. As important, the republican movement recognised that it was crucial to have peace and stability so that the two communities could learn to work together and to trust one another. Nothing of lasting value would be gained by achieving a united Ireland in which a large section of the Protestant minority would continue to be as alienated from the new order as Catholics had been from the old.
This is the reality which loyalists and Orangemen at Drumcree have yet to understand and accept. It may be that their own leaders have not done enough to explain it to them. But this week's attempt by the DUP and other anti-agreement unionists to expel Sinn Fein from the executive showed very clearly that there is no going back. David Trimble described the DUP motion as "irresponsible" and bound to heighten tensions at Drumcree. Changed times indeed!
Trimble's comment also highlights another reality of this whole process, which is that any act of generosity by one side helps to settle the other in a way which improves the prospects for both communities. The IRA's recent statement on the inspection of arms dumps is the most obvious recent example of this. By making what was for the whole republican movement a difficult and brave decision, the IRA has bolstered David Trimble's confidence in a dramatic fashion and enabled the UUP leader to be brave in his turn.
To return for a moment to Drumcree. The scenes of violence which seem set to continue for the next week will repel Irish nationalists, just as they shame and embarrass very many unionists. But it is not so very long since images of nationalist violence filled our screens and were universally condemned as the actions of brain-dead thugs. We need a more sympathetic understanding of what lies behind the ugly scenes at Drumcree. It would help, I believe, if the Abbey Theatre, which has staged Gary Mitchell's plays in the past, could bring Marching On to Dublin.