A star was born, er, but nobody noticed #5

At the time I was self-employed ducking and diving with my 'bits of old shrapnel'.  I came home one day slightly late for lunch, rushed into the kitchen to knock up a cup of tea and a sandwich and, as I always did, I switched on the radio.  It was the afternoon play on Radio4 and, dammit, it was an 'Oirish' play and after 20-odd years of 'The Troubles' the Irish accents grated on me.  Unfortunately, the kettle was boiling so I couldn't switch off straight away and thus, slowly, the language caught my attention.  It was intensely poetic whilst at the same time being formed of commonplace, street argot.  I had just about listened to a couple of minutes of it when the 'phone went and that was the end of it.  I never learned the name of the play and in fact I forgot about it.

About a year later I heard that someone at my AmDram group was intending to produce a play based on 'The Troubles' and instantly it came back to me and I wondered if it was the same play.  I read half of the first page and immediately recognised the style.  The play was Rat in the Skull by Ron Hutchinson, a much under-rated playwright in my opinion whose works deserve a wider audience.  The play is simple and simply staged taking place almost entirely in a London police station in the 1980s.  A young, cheeky but fanatical IRA bomber has been caught.  A bitter, hardened, RUC police officer is sent over from Belfast to interrogate him and hopefully turn him.  His efforts are monitored by two uncomprehending London coppers who are sick of the whole Irish problem which has turned their city into an armed camp.

The play is out of the ordinary in that most plays, books, articles about 'The Troubles' are nearly always on the side of the romantic Irish rebels fighting for their freedom and all that sort of yuk!  This was the first one that I had ever read which gave 'the Proddies' a fair voice.  Much of it is done in almost monologue form which, if delivered well, is riveting because of the quality of the writing.  Here are two extracts, the first from 'Demon Bomber' Roche, the IRA man and the second from Det. Insp. Nelson, RUC.  Try reading them slowly to yourselves and imagine the Irish accents, soft and lilting for Roche, hard and grating for Nelson:

ROCHE (sitting beneath blown up photos of his facial injuries received from D. I. Nelson)

"The holiday snaps.

Dear Mum, this is me in the Big Smoke.  I've seen all the sights, the Tower, the zoo, MacDonalds, the big red buses and the bottom sides of coppers' boots from the wrong way up.  They showed me the doings.  I was sat on my hunkers, somewhere north of the Northern Line, minding my own business, wondering whether to pick my nose or go for a slash, and a sledge hammer comes through the door, without so much as a by-your-leave. Followed in short order by half a dozen of the larger size of cop, waving guns and shouting hallo.  One of them shakes me by the balls and throws me across the room before I've a chance to say I didn't catch the name and I'm not that way inclined even so, and then it's down the stairs, the Human Brick, and into the wagon.  Through the black arse-end of which many a good man before yours truly has found himself, and never a reason given him neither.  Then in come the massed bands of the Metropolitan Police shouting hallo again, to sit on my head by way of keeping me company to Paddington Green.  They grow these lads big, believe me.  They like them big and ugly. . . ." and so on.

Here is a bit of D. I. Nelson at his sardonic best:

"NELSON:  Does it not say in there that the Roches have been blowing up innocent passers-by and RUC men as far back as as as, and who's Roche the Runt to buck the trend and let his grey-haired mother down, well into her eighties and still pulling Proddie winkies off.  There's the birds to think about.  The priest has far and away the better chance of pulling them, and despite the glamour of the gunman, down those back streets a fella has to be looking over his shoulder all the time.  You never know.  The skinny blonde with the big knockers and come hither eyes you meet at the ceilidh might just turn out to be an SAS sergeant once you get her back to your place.  But Rochey, like all his sort, puts women down the list.  He'd rather by far be running his hand along the barrel of a gun than along his own conjugal equipment.  Runty wasn't put on this good earth to breed sons, he was sent here to kill those of other men because the Roches, man, boy and dog on the mat were wedded to the cause.  And off he sets, in a beret two sizes too big and a borrowed pair of sunshades, to war, with a mother's blessing ringing sweetly in his ears, 'Fuck those Orange bastards, son.'"

I had an odd 'relationship' (if that is quite the word) with all the different characters I played.  I warmed to some of them (Barney Cashman), felt slightly repulsed by others (George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but actually the technical difficulties of trying to impersonate and thus illustrate someone else's character was, for an amateur like me, too engrossing to allow time and space for personal likes and dislikes.  However, when I played the tragic D. I. Nelson I did (I think!) imbue it with a certain amount of personal passion because of my sympathy for him and what he stood for.  Whether that improved or detracted from my performance I do not know.

It is a cracking little play and I enjoyed playing in it enormously.

 

Comments

[jimmy glesga]

David. London, England, Wales, Ulster, Scotland even Devon and Somerset was an armed camp when Herman Luftwaffe was bombing the shit out of our ancestors and the fuckin Irish Republic were neutral NAZI lovers that thought Adolf would fuck the British. On a lighter note we won and many thanks to the USA who stationed troops in Ulster for the big push. However how many troops were trained and stationed in ROI! to fight Herman. Answer none, only those who could wear civvies and cross the ROI border. And it is strange the ignorance among USA citizens that come back to dear old oireland that do not have a clue.

[Oswald Thake]

How many lives of British and American Merchant Seamen were lost be because of De Valera's refusal to allow Allied anti-submarine ships and aircraft to us the Treaty Ports to extend their reach into the Atlantic by about 400 miles? Something else Americans aren't told about.
I loathe this 'do anything for the Ould Sod' (except live there) American-Irish sentimentalism. I'll bet they were still collecting money in the Irish bars of Boston and New York in support of Irish terrorists murdering British citizens on British soil at the same time as Arab terrorists were murdering American citizens on American soil on that 9/11.

[David Duff]

Calm down, Jimmy. However, you are right to mention that in both world wars a substantial number of Irishmen volunteered for British service.

Point taken, Oswald, and at times American humbuggery can be hard to take.

[jimmy glesga]

David. It will be sometime in the future and we will have one foot in the grave when we find out that the PIRA were told to draw their necks in. I reckon the truce in Ireland was down to 9/11 and the Yanks telling the scumbags to put on hold their cause.