Bringing It All Back Home – extracts from three Belfast playwrights’ plays set in the city (Sanctuary Theatre until Saturday 17 August)

As I’ve mentioned before on the blog, I’m a big fan of rehearsed readings of plays. Sitting back, listening to well delivered dialogue and being able to imagine the location, the set, the costumes, the interactions. It’s why radio plays work so well. (Radio also has the added advantage of sound effects and added music, but it’s a very similar experience.) I find that it’s the dialogue and the intensity of interactions that stand out in my memories, not beautifully created tableaux of choreographed characters or stunning lighting effects. The words and the character relationships take centre stage without distraction.

Patsy Montgomery-Hughes is joint artistic director at Bright Umbrella Drama Co in east Belfast. This week, she’s presenting Bringing It All Back Home, with rehearsed extracts from three east Belfast plays that haven’t been staged before in full in the city.

A quartet of superb actors – Abigail McGibbon, Caroline Curran, Dan Gordon and Sean Kearns – bring their talent to bear on plays by David Ireland, Lucy Caldwell and Caitlin Magnall-Kearns. The 45-minute performance features two extracts from each of these three plays.

Never one to tiptoe around an issue when you could pull it apart like a vicious dog with a new stuffed toy, David Ireland’s Ulster American immediately latches onto the deep-grained complexity of identity in this place. “What is Ulster?” asks one of his characters, an acclaimed American actor who comes from a place of ignorance and makes a lot of assumptions that his local colleagues – a forthright playwright and an ambitious director – start to unpick. Even with only a few minutes of material, the actors’ take on Ireland’s script has the Sanctuary Theatre audience gasping, involuntarily moving their hands to their mouths. Their discomfort with the concepts, and how they are being expressed, is visceral.

Lucy Caldwell’s Leaves feels more gentile. In the first extract, we hear two parents debating whether “a place or a person is more than a name”. Their rambling dialogue hints that they’re avoiding addressing a much bigger problem under their roof.

Two colleagues working behind the counter in a chip shop are discussing life, the universe and everything in Caitlin Magnall-Kearns’s Orangefield. Can a hopeless romantic find love?

The run time is all too short, leaving everyone wanting to hear much more of one or more of the plays. These tasters have particularly strong flavours, particularly when savoured while sitting on wooden pews in east Belfast. Hopefully, one or more will get a full production, or at least a full reading at some point in the future. And hopefully, other unheard plays – like Abbie Spallen’s Strandline which enjoyed a brilliant reading back above The American Bar in 2022 – will eventually get a chance to grace a local stage and wow audiences with its wordplay.

Bringing It All Back Home finishes its run on Saturday 17 August with a 14:00 matinee and a 19:30 evening performance.

Photo credit: Gorgeous Photography

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