John Agee Ball: " 'Troubles' at the Tricycle Theatre and the Politics of Conflict Resolution"

     If many “alternative” British theatre companies embraced a rhetoric of revolutionary-socialist political action during the 1970s (eg the Portable Theatre Company), the escalation of the Cold War, the Falklands War, and the Irish War under Margaret Thatcher encouraged a range of political theatre ensembles to employ a less bellicose rhetorical strategy: the discourse of conflict resolution. During the 1980s, a dozen “conflict resolution” institutes appeared in the UK, such as those at the universities of Bradford and Aberystwyth. And as a disciplinary practice, conflict resolution became a central pedagogical element of Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) training in secondary education training for teachers and students. In this paper, I wish to examine how “CR,” as it is now abbreviated, shaped one arena of concern for committed British theatres in the 1980s: the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. In particular, I wish to focus on London’s Tricycle Theatre and its string of notable productions of that decade for, to paraphrase the company’s mission statement, “its Irish community.” Drawing on playscripts, production reviews, publicity materials and selected essays from the New Left Review, I wish to show how one British theatre worked out an alternative political framework for representing sectarian violence— primarily as a system of psychological trauma rather than as a structural conflict of historical/materialist interests. In my conclusion, I wish to venture some broader observations about the dubious persuasiveness of that rhetorical strategy, much maligned in Northern Ireland itself, and the British Left’s fumbling efforts to make itself relevant to the politics of regional devolution.