Writing for ‘the real national theatre’: Stewart Parker’s Plays for Television

Abstract

Stewart Parker’s writing, to borrow from Christopher Murray’s seminal work on twentieth-century Irish drama, does indeed hold a‘mirror up to nation’, but it is a cracked one that reflects at odd angles and produces idiosyncratic distortions and juxtapositions. Those angles and distortions are the product of a background memorably described by Parker himself in the foreword to Three Plays for Ireland: ‘Scots-Irish, Northern English, immigrant Huguenot & in short the usual Belfast mongrel crew, who have contrived between them to entangle me in the whole Irish-British cat’s cradle and thus to bequeath to me a subject for drama which is comprised of multiplying dualities’ (Plays: 2 xiii). Parker’s complex renegotiation of the past and his refusal to be suffocated by the grim politics of his present are indisputably at the core of his most acclaimed dramatic work, and have been the focus of considerable academic exegesis, the most welcome recent addition being Marilynn Richtarik’s excellent biography Stewart Parker: A Life (2012). While there is no gainsaying the significance of Parker’s history plays, Spokesong (1975), Northern Star (1984), Heavenly Bodies (1986) and Pentecost (1987), it seems timely to extend the ways in which Parker’s writings are understood and appreciated. There is, of course, the familiar Stewart Parker, author of seven challenging, witty and ultimately life-affirming stage plays, the playwright committed to producing ‘alternative versions’ (Dramatis Personae 24) of Northern Irish experience on stage, whose work is commemorated by the Stewart Parker Trust Award. This Parker has captured the imaginations of an enthusiastic, but by no means extensive enough, group of theatre scholars, practitioners and commentators.