Stewart Parker, the UWC Strike of May 1974, and Prisons

This chapter explores the UWC strike of May 1974 through the prism of playwright Stewart Parker. A native of East Belfast, Parker experimented with the dramatic form at the same time as structuring his work around the politics, divisions, and contradictions of his own community. The strike led to the destruction of the Sunningdale power-sharing Executive, though this was as much an expression of working-class Protestant power as an assault on the concept of nationalists (and Catholics) in power. This connectedly takes in Loyalist prisoners who began swelling the jails, a familiar academic concentration but seldom addressed through a cultural prism. Martin Lynch’s Chronicles of Long Kesh (2009) tackles the experience via a contested portrayal of Loyalist prisoners. The chapter ends with a return to Stewart Parker’s capacious and self-critical take on Ulster Protestant identity.

Introduction

This book is a synthesis of the political and the creative, telescoping modern history and politics with theatre and television drama. It centres on ten writers: St John Ervine (1883–1971), Thomas Carnduff (1886–1956), John Hewitt (1907–87), Sam Thompson (1916–65), Stewart Parker (1941–88), Graham Reid (1945–), Ron Hutchinson (1947–), Gary Mitchell (1965–), Christina Reid (1942–2015), and Marie Jones (1951–). While never intending to ghettoize Protestant writers, or indeed suggest that only those from this background can write illuminatingly about it, one of the reasons the book does not focus on the work of a playwright like Donegal-born Frank McGuinness—especially ...

‘Into the Future Tense’: Stewart Parker's Theatre of ‘Anticipatory Illumination’

Stewart Parker described his final play, Pentecost, as one appropriate to his own generation, ‘making its own scruffy way onto the stage of history, and from there to the future tense’. This article argues that it is this concern with entering ‘the future tense’ which allies his work with the writings of the messianic marxist, Ernst Bloch, and his belief in ‘anticipatory illumination’. Read in this way Parker's plays are liberated from the negative reading of them as informed by ‘sentimental piety’ and ‘a species of liberal humanism’ and sees them as creating what Bloch termed ‘concrete utopias’ which ‘imply a real future’. In his John Malone memorial lecture of 1986 Parker asked ‘should plays aim to instruct?’. His answer to this question, which informs all his work, was an uncompromising ‘Yes’. His work, like that of Brecht with whom he shared a belief in theatre as an ‘entertaining’ means of social transformation, merits serious consideration for producing what Stephen Rea termed ‘a vision of a harmonious possibility on the other side of violence’. In Bloch's view ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at’. Parker's drama provided - and provides - just such maps by which the future can not simply be dreamed, but realised.