Gary Mitchell's new play, presented by 7:84 theatre company, is written from his own experience of working-class loyalism. Setting his drama on the July weekend of Orange marches, Mitchell is assured of a charged political backdrop, but what really motivates him is how this affects generations of the same family.
What this means is a concentration on a claustrophobic domestic interior, with the violence outside represented only through sound. The details of family life are the dramatic landscape through which Mitchell reveals the changing face of loyalism. This has its limitations. While the personal consequences of the conflict are made clear (the grandfather has had minor heart attacks; the RUC officer son's marriage has broken up; the grandson is involved with paramilitaries), the crisis beyond the sitting room never feels real.
More problematically, it repeats stock scenarios familiar from nationalist visions of the Troubles: the tragic maternal figure and the doomed romance between Scottish Johnny, over for the marches, and Lorraine. In his attempt to make the family's troubles universal, Mitchell throws away the chance to offer new insight into Protestant culture.
There are some more promising elements. Mitchell is interested in the relationship between Scotland and Ulster, the influx of Scots for the marches. Just as Johnny is revealed to have a woefully limited understanding of the context he finds himself in, Lorraine, the granddaughter, shows her romanticised notion of the Scots-Ulster link. She hero-worshipped Johnny as she grew up, thinking him "like Braveheart, only Protestant". But this aspect of the play is at loggerheads with another central concern: the plight of the middle generation, the son in the RUC, having to enforce orders against his own community. But Mitchell doesn't develop his character deeply enough to hold the emotional centre of the play together.
