Equally the growing tension and burden on Eric to face what he has done is reflected in quick cuts between Eric and Bridget that skilfully respond to the movements and emotional flow within the play. Last modified on Thu 26 Mar 2020 12.30 GMT. “He was another Sam who was out on his own, really,” he says. Physically, psychologically, he goes so deep that you cannot but respond. For more details click here. He loved Brecht and Beckett.” Was it a shared passion for theatre that brought them together? He said: ‘Don’t think about meaning, think about rhythm', After a stint at the Abbey Theatre School in Dublin, he moved to London for a time, joining Freehold, an experimental theatre group. The story of one man struggling with the past and terrified of the future. In the light of all that happens afterwards, it is the pivotal moment in an absurdist drama that is a provocative but illuminating exploration of Ulster loyalist identity in extremis. One of the key differences here has been the insertion of externally filmed sequences that take Eric and Bridget to the streets of Belfast, both to the titular Cyprus Avenue as well as the park where Eric’s final breakdown is catalysed. Cyprus Avenue returns to the Royal Court in 2019. All rights reserved. “It was a huge thing for me,” he says. The Belfast I grew up in was a pre-Troubles city, so not progressive in any meaningful way. “I was fired on by loyalists on the Falls Road,” he tells me. “On one level, their reaction was the same as everywhere else – palpable horror because the audience never think he will go as far as he does. Read our. He’s in denial about whatever happened to him in the Troubles – the people close to him who have died, the cost of what he has done. It would be an insult to myself to have to think that way. She’s a poet and an asylum-seeker. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Identity changes. A newly released documentary, I Dolours, is constructed around it. His family keep telling him to stop living in the past and fighting old battles that nobody cares about anymore but his cultural heritage is under siege. “To be welcomed as Irish by English people calling themselves Irish. Originally produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre five years ago, the production of Cyprus Avenue was adapted into a film mixing live performance on stage at the Royal Court with location shooting in Belfast. “It was very exciting. “Probably. If we don’t discriminate, we don’t survive!”, ‘David Ireland’s shocking new play balances humour and horror, with Stephen Rea superb as an Ulster loyalist suspicious of his ‘Fenian’ baby granddaughter.’, Susannah Clapp | The Observer Read full review, Dominic Cavendish | The Daily Telegraph Read full review, ‘Helped by an astonishing Rea, the play is provocative, and horribly unforgettable.’, ‘Stephen Rea is phenomenal in this satirical comedy about a man who thinks his granddaughter is Gerry Adams.’, Andrzej Lukowski | Time Out Read full review, Age guidance 14+ Conversations with leading playwrights. But David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue, which has arrived at the Royal Court after an earlier showing at the Abbey in Dublin, left me far more shaken and stirred. “Without prejudice we’re nothing! I was reminded of the poem as I read Cyprus Avenue, David Ireland’s controversially violent play about Eric Miller, an ageing Ulster loyalist whose sectarian extremism has shaded into psychosis to the point where he thinks his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. “When he was in the Crum [Crumlin Road jail], he used to sing the British national anthem at the top of his voice to confuse them.”, Throughout the 70s, Rea worked regularly in theatre and appeared fitfully in films and television dramas, landing a substantial role as an exiled Czech dissident in Professional Foul, a 1977 BBC play by Tom Stoppard. Chris Corrigan as the Unionist terrorist Slim, Amy Molloy as perplexed daughter Julie and Andrea Irvine as wife Bernie all add texture as Eric’s world view narrows to the point of disaster. All of this other stuff that people go on about – ‘What’s my intention? That was immense. It is the mark of a truly committed actor who never falters. Living in Belfast and fiercely British, Grandfather Eric Miller becomes increasingly disturbed by the resemblance of his 5-week old granddaughter to Gerry Adams and goes to some lengths to prove to his mystified daughter and wife that tiny Mary May is the Sinn Fein politician incarnate. In person, Rea is engaging and easygoing company, but one can sense his deep passion for radical politics and theatre. “Beckett gave me two groundbreaking notes. By turns mesmerising and chilling, particularly when she relates her role as a driver in the “disappearances” of suspected informers, her testimony provides latter-day evidence of WB Yeats’s dictum that “too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart”. The other day, a woman came up to me in a supermarket and said [shifts into a working-class north Dublin accent]: ‘I just want to tell you, I loved your movie, and my husband says it should be shown in every school.’ Now, that sort of thing means a lot more to me than any highbrow reviews.”, I ask him how Dublin audiences reacted to Cyprus Avenue when it played in the Abbey theatre earlier this year, the violence of the Troubles having arguably placed an even bigger psychological distance between the republic and the six counties than the creation of the border in 1921. I just decided for a time not to do any interviews.” He trails off and looks pained. And it is that loss of control that Rea – already a renowned film actor – conveys so well to camera, which escalates into paranoia and a conclusion that is astoundingly grave. Bridget is seen examining the symbols and protest art in the communities most affected by the Troubles, and while these sequences add little to what is a tightly plotted piece of drama, the additional context is interesting, while creating variation in the screening style, as Bridget and Eric’s conversation is heard as voiceover as well as in filmed conversation. Along the way, he also worked, and became friends with, another master of ambiguity, the late Sam Shepard, about whom he wrote a heartfelt appreciation for this newspaper following the latter’s death last year. I remember getting the script and putting it down at the end of the first act, thinking ‘this is a masterpiece’. The intensity that Rea brings to bear on the characters he plays is in stark contrast to his relaxed offstage demeanour. But Ireland has written a fantastic, tightly coiled play that explores the legacy of Britain and Ireland’s relationship in the past 100 years and how complicated peace can be even for those who fought so long and so hard for it. It can change with a poem you might read or a song you might listen to. It can be very confusing.” The whole experience was so threatening to his sense of identity, he tells her, that he woke up the following day “full of shame and regret” and never drank again. Price died in 2013, but not before she had granted an interview with political journalist Ed Moloney, with the proviso that it be broadcast after her death. It’s pure isolation. “Gerry Adams has disguised himself as a new-born baby and successfully infiltrated my family home.”. This reticence may be “the tight gag of place” that Seamus Heaney identified as a trademark of Northern Irishness, but more likely it is a form of self-protection against interviewers who broach the singular circumstance of his personal life. Cyprus Avenue returns to the Royal Court in 2019. It played with identity in such a forward-thinking way as a flexible, fluid, elastic thing. “That’s an interesting question,” he says. In 1983, Rea married Dolours Price, an IRA volunteer who had not long been released from prison having served seven years for her part in the bombing of the Old Bailey in March 1973. Starring Stephen Rea and directed by Vicky Featherstone, the film version of the award-winning Cyprus Avenue by David Ireland mixed live capture of performance from the iconic Royal Court Theatre stage production with location shooting in Belfast. To his utter surprise, he found himself enjoying the experience and, seduced by the heady atmosphere of inclusion, ended up drinking Guinness and singing Irish rebel songs. It’s understood. Put simply, they would not do anything the Free State [Ireland] did. “I had no sense of how groundbreaking it would be when we were making it, but I think Neil had. People will say, ‘Oh, that’s bullshit’, but it really isn’t.”, Rea was born in Belfast in 1946 to nominally Protestant parents and grew up in a house where there was a “pretty relaxed” attitude to religion. They had two sons, who are now in their early 20s, and of whom Rea is fiercely protective. “People were so offended by the play in New York that they stormed out of the theatre,” says Ireland. Such is the disturbing power of Rea’s performance that Cyprus Avenue will undoubtedly be one of the hottest tickets in town when it returns to London’s Royal Court theatre next year following a critically lauded run there back in August 2016. He gives the question considerable thought, staring off out the window. It remains a magnificent play, a masterful exploration of identity, which is our concern on this island, of course, our obsession.”, At the Royal Court in 1976, he worked with Samuel Beckett on Endgame, a daunting experience made all the more so by the fact that he was taking over the role of Clov after Jack MacGowran, the playwright’s favourite actor, died. There was another line in which Clov says: ‘I’ll leave you.’ I wanted to know if he was going to the kitchen or going for good? Or seen. Our mission is to provide the most in-depth, nationwide arts coverage online.
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