by There is a stand-off over an Orange march in the North, and in the drama section I found the Belfast play that explained a century ago who benefits when neighbours are set against each other
Tuesday, the Shop, Drama Shelves
The house clearance from Maida Vale is still not fully priced. Forty boxes of plays. I have been on my knees in the back room for a fortnight and have reached box thirty-one.
This morning it gave up a thin grey volume in the old Abbey Theatre series. Dublin, 1911. A play called Mixed Marriage, by a man named St John Ervine. I had heard of it and never read it. I sat down on the step-stool and did not get up for an hour.
My mother rang at eleven with the Irish papers, as she does. And for once the two halves of my life were about the same thing.
What She Read Me
There is trouble in the North. I had half followed it. She had the Irish Times open at the politics page and went down the headlines.
A Protestant group, one said, is pressing the British government to end the Drumcree stand-off, and is quoted saying that everybody wants this to end. The Taoiseach has appealed for calm over the weekend, ahead of a legal challenge. Another piece has him rejecting a comparison somebody had made between the stand-off and a war abroad.
From an earlier column she read that there had been heated exchanges in the Northern Assembly. The main unionist party had accused the First Minister of breaking the law. Her party had answered with hard words about the history of that parade. Both governments were said to be stressing that the power-sharing institutions must be protected.
I am not going to pretend I understand the rights and wrongs of this particular week. I do not, and I am in a bookshop in London. But I know the name. Anyone of my mother’s age does.
Drumcree
It is a church on a hill outside a town in County Armagh. Every July for two hundred years, the Orange Order has marched to a service there and back.
The way back runs down a road through a district that is now Catholic. The marchers say it is their traditional route and they are walking home from church. The residents say they do not want a parade celebrating a victory over them coming past their doors.
In the 1990s it became a siege. Thousands of men on the hill. Soldiers and wire across the fields. Riots in towns all over the North. People died. Since then the march has been barred from that road, and every Sunday for more than twenty-five years a few men have walked to the police line and handed in a letter of protest.
So it never ended. It was only held in place. And now, it seems, something has moved.
The Play
Here is why I could not put down the grey book.
Mixed Marriage is set in a kitchen in Belfast in the years before the Great War. A working-class Protestant family. The father, John Rainey, is a decent, upright, stubborn man. An Orangeman. Respected in his street.
There is a strike on. The shipyard and mill workers, Protestant and Catholic alike, are out together for better pay. That almost never happened. The employers are worried, because as long as the two sorts of workers stand side by side, they will win.
A Catholic labour man comes to Rainey and asks him to speak at a meeting. To tell the Protestant workers to hold firm beside the Catholics. Rainey agrees. He can see it is right. He is the one man they will all listen to.
Then he learns that his own son means to marry a Catholic girl.
And everything in him turns over. He will stand on a platform with Catholics. He will not have one in the family. He withdraws. Worse, he goes out and preaches the old hatred, and the strike breaks into a riot. The Protestant workers turn on the Catholic ones. The soldiers are called in.
The girl runs out into the street and is shot.
What Ervine Saw
It is a blunt play. It was written fast, by a young man. But it has one idea that I have not been able to shake since this morning.
The quarrel in the street is real. Rainey truly believes what he believes. It is his religion and his people and his father before him.
And it is also extremely convenient for somebody else. The play is quite clear about that. The mill owners do not appear. They do not need to. They have only to wait. As soon as the workers remember they are Protestant and Catholic, they forget they are workers, and the strike is over.
Ervine does not say the hatred was put there by the bosses. It was there already. But he shows who gains each time it is stirred.
There is a line of the wife’s that I shall not try to quote, because the book is not mine to copy from and I have only read it once. She says, in effect, that the men have their marching and their speeches, and it is the women who are left with the dead.
Reading It Now
I want to be careful. A play from 1911 does not explain a news story from 2026. The North is not what it was. There is a parliament in which both sides sit. The woman at the head of it comes from the community that, in Ervine’s day, could not have got a job in the shipyard.
And I have no standing. My mother is from Sligo, which is in the Republic, a hundred miles from Portadown. My father was from Surrey. I am a Londoner who sells old books.
But I notice the shape. A road. A walk along it that means one thing to those walking and another to those watching. Nobody able to give way, because to give way is to lose what you are.
And I notice the thing Ervine noticed. That while people are fixed on the road, other matters are not being attended to. The hospitals in the North, my mother tells me, have the longest waiting lists in these islands. The schools are short. That is true whichever foot you kick with.
Fairness to Rainey
What makes the play better than a tract is that Ervine does not despise the father.
He was a Belfast Protestant himself. He knew those men. Rainey is not a bigot in a cartoon. He is brave and honest and he loves his son. He does a terrible thing because the one demand life makes of him is the one he cannot meet.
That seems to me true to how these things are. The men on that hill in the nineties were not monsters, and neither were the people on the road. Each was defending something that felt like the whole of themselves.
The Protestant group in my mother’s headline, saying everybody wants this to end, sounds to me like the son in the play. Or the wife.
What Became of the Author
A sad footnote. Ervine wrote that play as a young socialist who believed the workers of Belfast could unite. He lost a leg in the war. He grew older, moved to England and became a fierce unionist and a rather sour critic.
The man who wrote Mixed Marriage would not have liked the man he turned into. That happens. The play is still there.
Wednesday
I have priced it at twelve pounds and put it in the window, beside The Last September. They can keep each other company.
My mother rang again to say there was nothing new. She said, “They’re talking. That’s something.” She remembers when they were not.
A customer who reads the London Prat sent me to see how it handles such things. With care, on the whole. Its British satirical news on marching season goes after the politicians on all sides and leaves the people on the road alone, and its London satirical news about plays that cause riots has a first night in Dublin that I think is meant for the old Abbey. My Boston lecturer says Bohiney Magazine has never attempted the subject and that this is wise.
It is the women who are left with the dead. I think that is roughly it. I shall read it again tonight to be sure.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
