The Crack in Everything.
It's taken me a couple of days to write about Jo Egan's new play "The Crack in Everything".
Written as part of her residency at The Playhouse in Derry, the play was written from interviews with six families who had children killed in the Troubles. Some of the actors on stage are members of the victims families. One was a victim of the Claudy bombs.
As a foreigner living in Northern Ireland, watching the regional news is a disquieting thing, because Northern Irish news is rarely new: often its thirty or forty years old and its always the same: a procession of sad eyed stoics demanding justice, a black and white photo of a dead family member from a time before modern photographic ubiquity They are posed, smiling children in newsprint black and white, their hair neatly combed. A photo was a big deal then. I look around at the audience and they're mostly older people. Not one of them is untouched by this. They could all tell these stories. They could all have been these dead children.
Little Damien Harkin was killed when a nervous army lorry driver mounts the curb. His death is officially listed as a traffic accident. Damien is like a little old man in the photo, with his tidied hair and newsreader specs. He would never get to be an old man.
They look like normal kids, grinning goofily, most of them negotiating adolescence. But they are living through extraordinary times. Individual lines suddenly arrest you: "I'm eight years old and I'm going to school with a bullet in my pocket." The priest at Damien's funeral declares that "he was taken before the evils of the world can touch him", in the face of all available evidence. Its not a time for irony. The soldier who kills Damien gets a ten pound fine and points on his licence.
The magic of "The Crack in Everything" is the detail, the little human asides - the McGavigan sisters going off to buy a single cigarette - or the fact that they would check out the "talent" at the rioting; brick throwing was sexy and cool, and all the girls liked a man with a strong throwing arm.
Kathryn Eakin was cleaning a window when the first Claudy bomb went off. "I remember a bottle of Windolene on the step." All these terrible, human things. The compensation the family get for Kathryn's death is £56. The stories are small the way modest human interaction is small: ordinary lives devastated by sudden catastrophic violence, no warning given.
The six actors confront the audience face on, their hands knitted in front of them. Behind them is slow grainy footage of the Troubles in black and white, billowing like smoke, like clouds of brick dust. The speeches flit between the actors: scene-setting, memory, conversation, all are shared. It is an astonishing feat and the actors acquit themselves well. Sentences sometimes seem to be started by somebody only to be finished by someone else. It is a fierce tide of language, unbound and consuming, as if these were not an individual's words but a people's: defiant, tireless, still pressing on, still demanding truth.
This is an extraordinary piece of work: angry, harrowing, poignant and often, surprisingly often, funny. The structure is the same for each story and the narrative rises like a wave, cresting into shocking violence, then falling to an aftermath, to the piecing together of broken lives when there is always a piece missing. And always the face of a dead child.
You've built up your own picture of what the kids are like - there's a feast of anecdotal evidence, there's the horror of the story and there's the family's struggles for decades. You think you know them. And then there's that photo: those grinning, fearless, cheeky faces. And always so much younger than you think.
Written as part of her residency at The Playhouse in Derry, the play was written from interviews with six families who had children killed in the Troubles. Some of the actors on stage are members of the victims families. One was a victim of the Claudy bombs.
As a foreigner living in Northern Ireland, watching the regional news is a disquieting thing, because Northern Irish news is rarely new: often its thirty or forty years old and its always the same: a procession of sad eyed stoics demanding justice, a black and white photo of a dead family member from a time before modern photographic ubiquity They are posed, smiling children in newsprint black and white, their hair neatly combed. A photo was a big deal then. I look around at the audience and they're mostly older people. Not one of them is untouched by this. They could all tell these stories. They could all have been these dead children.
Little Damien Harkin was killed when a nervous army lorry driver mounts the curb. His death is officially listed as a traffic accident. Damien is like a little old man in the photo, with his tidied hair and newsreader specs. He would never get to be an old man.
They look like normal kids, grinning goofily, most of them negotiating adolescence. But they are living through extraordinary times. Individual lines suddenly arrest you: "I'm eight years old and I'm going to school with a bullet in my pocket." The priest at Damien's funeral declares that "he was taken before the evils of the world can touch him", in the face of all available evidence. Its not a time for irony. The soldier who kills Damien gets a ten pound fine and points on his licence.
The magic of "The Crack in Everything" is the detail, the little human asides - the McGavigan sisters going off to buy a single cigarette - or the fact that they would check out the "talent" at the rioting; brick throwing was sexy and cool, and all the girls liked a man with a strong throwing arm.
Kathryn Eakin was cleaning a window when the first Claudy bomb went off. "I remember a bottle of Windolene on the step." All these terrible, human things. The compensation the family get for Kathryn's death is £56. The stories are small the way modest human interaction is small: ordinary lives devastated by sudden catastrophic violence, no warning given.
The six actors confront the audience face on, their hands knitted in front of them. Behind them is slow grainy footage of the Troubles in black and white, billowing like smoke, like clouds of brick dust. The speeches flit between the actors: scene-setting, memory, conversation, all are shared. It is an astonishing feat and the actors acquit themselves well. Sentences sometimes seem to be started by somebody only to be finished by someone else. It is a fierce tide of language, unbound and consuming, as if these were not an individual's words but a people's: defiant, tireless, still pressing on, still demanding truth.
This is an extraordinary piece of work: angry, harrowing, poignant and often, surprisingly often, funny. The structure is the same for each story and the narrative rises like a wave, cresting into shocking violence, then falling to an aftermath, to the piecing together of broken lives when there is always a piece missing. And always the face of a dead child.
You've built up your own picture of what the kids are like - there's a feast of anecdotal evidence, there's the horror of the story and there's the family's struggles for decades. You think you know them. And then there's that photo: those grinning, fearless, cheeky faces. And always so much younger than you think.
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