‘Parallel Games’ and Queer Memories: Performing LGBT Testimonies
in Northern Ireland

Lehner, S. (2017). ‘Parallel Games’ and Queer Memories: Performing LGBT Testimonies in Northern Ireland.
Irish University Review, 47(1), 103-118. https://doi.org/10.3366/iur.2017.0259

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 1 

‘Parallel Games’ and Queer Memories: Performing LGBT Testimonies in 

Northern Ireland1 

Stefanie Lehner 

 

In the recent performed queer archive (with video installations), Trouble, written by 

Shannon Yee and produced, designed, and directed by Niall Rea (the latter, with Anna 

Newell), Northern Irish actor Jimmy Kerr delivers a short monologue from a video 

screen, explaining to the audience the difficulty of living in Northern Ireland as a gay 

man: 

 

Staying in Northern Ireland…there is a sort of trauma that stays with you, 

someone in a battering relationship or poisonous relationship with alcohol, 

you know you should break away from it but you keep returning to it. That’s a 

problem. There’s a cognitive dissonance there for gay people. You want to be 

part of a family, you want to be part of a church, you want to be part of society 

but if they know you as you really are, they won’t accept you. But you really 

want to be accepted. So you play a parallel game in your life.2 

 

Trouble, as apparent in its promotion poster (Figure 1), uses for its ‘o’ the symbol of a 

‘pink triangle, rewind button’ to indicate its intention of recovering ‘the experiences 

of a generation of individuals from the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and 

Transgender] community that realised their sexuality while growing up during the 

Troubles in Northern Ireland’.3 Based on 46 interviews, it documents ‘individual’s 

private stories of cultural identity, sexuality and coming out, religion, feminism, 

sectarianism, racism, conversion therapy, paramilitaries, politics, the normalization of 



 2 

violence and the effects of the Troubles on the psyche’ against the larger historical, 

political backdrop of the Northern Irish conflict.4 As such, it delineates a complex 

matrix of exclusions – but also a desire for inclusion – that define and regulate 

expressions of identity and sexuality in Northern Ireland, as suggested by the speaker 

above. His desire to belong to structures that oppress and discriminate against him 

force this man to ‘play a parallel game’: for him, this is a necessary strategy of 

survival in an extremely homophobic society. While the concept of playing a ‘game’ 

gestures here towards the rules, roles, and regulatory practices that define and confine 

expressions of identity (including gender and sexuality), it foregrounds at the same 

time their construction; the performative nature of all identities. The notion of 

parallelism suggests, on the one hand, the incompatibility of ethno-nationalism with 

LGBT issues in a deeply divided society such as Northern Ireland. The 

incommensurability between sectarian and queer politics is also addressed in Niall 

Rea’s Divided, Radical and Gorgeous (D.R.A.G.), which explores the personal 

experiences of a Belfast drag queen in the form of a testimonial monologue that 

recounts her relationship with a closeted ‘freedom fighter’. Furthermore, queer 

identities are used by both productions as an ‘analogous’ lens to deconstruct and 

disrupt sectarian divisions of difference.5 The notion of playing a ‘parallel game’ can, 

thus, be read as a meta-theatrical commentary that emphasises that while these plays, 

based on personal memories of the Troubles, are products of their socio-historical 

reality, they also provide an alternative, transformative realm, in which it is possible 

to rethink the conditions of the present through uncovering silenced and neglected 

voices and experiences of the past. Both plays do so by ‘queering’ memories of the 

Troubles that may otherwise be filtered through an ethno-nationalist lens. While in 

Northern Ireland, collective memory has congealed into two mutually exclusive 



 3 

versions of history (namely, Protestant/unionist/loyalist and 

Catholic/nationalist/republican), ‘queer memory’, as David Cregan suggests, ‘is 

transformative in seeking to destabilise any particular version of the past. It offers a 

self-reflective and socially challenging voice in the midst of memory formation, 

queering marginalized memory as well as memory of the dominant.’6 

 

This essay explores how the notion of ‘parallel games’ works to queer memory in two 

productions of Northern Ireland’s first publicly funded gay theatre company, 

TheatreofplucK, led by artistic director Niall Rea.7 Both plays have seen different 

versions as part of their development: Trouble saw its first incarnation in an 

invitation-only workshop at the Metropolitan Arts Centre (MAC) in Belfast in the 

summer of 2013,8 while there have been three iterations of D.R.A.G. to date: Rea 

initially worked with Gordon Crawford (who performs as the Belfast drag queen 

Trudy Scrumptious), who played in the first two versions in 2012, and was joined by 

Paul C. Boyd, who took over the role in 2012. This essay focuses on the world 

premiere of Trouble at the MAC in November 2015 as part of OUTBURST Queer 

Arts Festival, and the last, recorded version of D.R.A.G. at The Belfast Barge as part 

of the Belfast Pride Festival in July/August 2012. As post-conflict memory works, 

based on the testimonies of the interviewees, as in the case of Trouble, or 

autobiographical memories of both director and actors, as in the case of D.R.A.G., and 

conceived, developed, and produced after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, both plays 

directly engage with contemporary debates about how to deal with the legacy of the 

past in Northern Ireland. In publicly performing and thus giving voice to previously 

silenced and hidden stories of LGBT people during the conflict, both productions 

address the call of the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, that resulted from the series 



 4 

of negotiations between Dr Richard Haass and Professor Meghan O’Sullivan in 

autumn 2013, for the establishment of ‘an Oral History Archive to provide a central 

place for people from all backgrounds (and from throughout the UK and Ireland) to 

share experiences and narratives related to the Troubles.’9 This endeavour promises 

plurality by including disparate and incommensurable stories; yet, there is also a 

danger within any archival project that certain experiences, voices, and stories find 

more representation and greater valorisation than others. Given the reluctance of 

certain groups, such as former police officers, to participate in such storytelling 

activities, and the high profile of other voices and stories, it seems difficult for such 

an archive to present proportionally who was affected by the Troubles in equal 

measure.10  

 

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida points to the etymology of the term ‘archive’, 

which ‘names at once the commencement and the commandment’: that is, archives 

denote origins as much as they are products of authority, control, and power.11 As Ed 

Madden puts it, ‘they produce as much as they record and preserve’.12 As the 

promised multiplicity of stories will commence new understandings of the past, 

present, as well as the future, and thereby contribute to the ‘fresh start’ envisioned by 

the 1998 Agreement, the archival impulse displayed in its wake is, as Colin Graham 

notes, at the same time, suggestive of a desire ‘to cram all that glistens with the not-

so-gold of the Troubles into a memory bank of material culture and traumatic non-

recall.’13 In this regard, the establishment of an oral history archive seems a necessary 

step for ‘moving on’ from the legacy of the past; for moving beyond the trauma and 

residual sectarian legacies of the Troubles. In other words, the past is viewed through 

an educative prism and is closely connected to a progressive and purposive morality 



 5 

that was perhaps most succinctly captured in the decision to use Margaret Fairless 

Barber’s words as an epigraph to the 2009 Report of the Consultative Group on the 

Past in Northern Ireland: ‘To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to 

restore it, and to render it more fit for its prime function of looking forward’.14 Given 

the effective institutionalisation of ethno-nationalist understandings of the conflict,15 

the political imperative, then, seems to be double-edged: in one respect, it must entail, 

if not a suppression, then, at least a muting of memories that stand outwith the ethnic 

paradigm; and, in another, it ought to facilitate the implicit valorising of narratives 

that support a progressivist vision of contemporary Northern Irish society.  

 

Both D.R.A.G. and Trouble disturb such a progressivist understanding of ‘moving 

on’: instead of memories being harnessed to the ethno-nationalist template established 

by the Belfast Agreement, the plays ‘move’ memory work in different directions at 

the same time, giving rise to a diverse set of emotions. This movement, in other 

words, parallels the Agreement’s filtration of experience and belief into ethnicised 

modalities. The plays thus resonate with Michael Rothberg’s concept of 

‘multidirectional memory’, which is based on a malleable, pluralist understanding of 

memory, considering it ‘as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and 

borrowing: as productive and not privative’.16 Whereas the focus of Rothberg’s model 

is on the articulation and performance of traumatic memories across transnational and 

intercultural contexts, the testimonies performed in both TheatreofplucK productions 

are ‘multidirectional’ insofar as they rupture the dominant perception of Northern 

Ireland as a ‘place apart’ – ‘a recalcitrantly regressive place somehow separate from 

the modern progressive world’17: for by focusing on the memories of LGBT people, 

they challenge (ethno and hetero)normative understandings of victimisation, 



 6 

oppression, and isolations while, at the same time, recovering ‘new forms of solidarity 

and new visions of justice’.18 In this way, the productions could also be said to initiate 

‘parallel games’ with their audiences: the past is dis/uncovered not just in terms of 

regionality, sectarianism and violence, but also in its containment of alternative forms 

of communality and togetherness.  

 

This creates not so much ‘moving memories’ in the sense of simply becoming 

emotionally involved through sympathy or empathy in identifying individually with 

the characters; instead, the use of memories in both productions produces quasi 

Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte that emphatically unsettle the spectators to make them 

adopt ‘an attitude of inquiry and criticism’ towards accepted and prescriptive readings 

of Troubles memories as well as contemporaneous approaches to dealing with the past 

along those lines.19 In line with several post-conflict theatre performances by 

companies such as Kabosh, Tinderbox, Big Telly, and Prime Cut, both D.R.A.G. and 

Trouble do so by harnessing experimental theatre techniques, such as the use of 

verbatim, improvisation, multi-media, and audience involvement, if to different 

extends. For instance, whereas Trouble is predominantly inspired by verbatim theatre, 

in the style of American playwrights Anna Deavere and Eve Ensler, whereby actors 

seek to carefully replicate the natural cadences, enunciation, silences, and emotions of 

the original voice recordings,20 D.R.A.G. used detailed autobiographical interviews 

with the performers to inspire games of improvisation. Both productions construct a 

bricolage of the different memories and testimonials, repeatedly challenging audience 

experience and expectation by creating parallel sensations of estrangement, exclusion, 

and isolation as well as connectedness, inclusion, and integration.  

 



 7 

D.R.A.G. and Trouble self-consciously draw attention to their status as ‘games’ that 

ask for audience participation but also their awareness of what Al Head calls ‘the 

“Foolish” insight’ that ‘all the conventional ways of being are “only a game” and that 

the “masks” that we play can be picked up or put down at will.’21 Head suggests this 

as a queer strategy ‘to help us in our analyses of the dominant society and the way it 

“creates” stereotypes of gender and sexuality’ and other forms of identity, and, we 

might add, history; as such, it plays a crucial role in TheatreofplucK’s queer 

dramaturgy. Rea opens both productions with a short spiel introducing the spectators 

to what he calls ‘the rules of game’.22 For D.R.A.G., he asks each of them to write a 

queer ‘devotion’ on a small piece of black paper before entering the actual 

performance space, which they then place on the stage, itself already covered with 

hundreds of other identical pieces of paper. The significance of these papers is 

twofold: one the one hand, handwritten notes with directorial comments, often based 

on the autobiographical interviews held before each rehearsal with the actors, were 

used for the improvisations that shaped and developed the direction of D.R.A.G., and 

were also included in the final productions, which use the pieces of paper, apparently 

randomly picked up from the floor of the stage, to introduce different scenes, subjects 

and topics of the life of the main character ‘P’. On the other hand, by offering a 

personalised ‘devotion’, which was often a private memory, wish, or just a thought or 

a comment,23 the audience engaged through these papers in what Rea conceived of as 

a ‘community ritual’, resonant of the rag trees that dot the Irish landscape.24 As Rea 

explains, this ‘ritual’ was intended to offer each spectator ‘a kind of direct and 

personal queer connection to the onstage world; temporally disconnected from the 

“straight” outside world’, yet thereby suggesting their parallelism.25 D.R.A.G. itself 

opens with the performer, initially covered by these papers, rising naked, vulnerable, 



 8 

and bruised from this heap; as Rea notes: ‘The performer here was born from the 

audiences[’] own engagement, queerly energised’.26 This, I want to suggest, is a truly 

queering and thus destabilising energy that creates intimacy at the same time as 

discomfort, drawing the audience in as much as keeping them at bay. Given that the 

performance uses the same black papers to mark its scenes, with each seemingly 

randomly selected paper shown to a camera so that its inscription is projected to the 

black backwall of the stage, there is an anxiety amongst the audience that their own 

personal ‘devotions’ will be revealed.27 At the same time, their ‘queer confessional’ 

creates what Rea calls a ‘public bond’28 with the performer, which is compounded by 

what a reviewer describes as ‘the cramped, claustrophobic surroundings of the Belfast 

Barge [where] the seating arrangements bring the audience challengingly close to 

Paul C. Boyd’s tormented, stripped down presence.’29 

 

Rea’s thrust staging replicates the space dynamics of drag clubs, evoking both a 

dressing room as well as a nightclub stage. The white cubic set provides the audience 

with a sort of proscenium frame, which – together with the use of the camera, 

installed next to a vanity mirror, and projecting onto the backwall – raises awareness 

to the dynamics and power of the spectator’s gaze. This visual play with intimacy and 

exposure parallels the use of the papers and the way in which ‘P’ immediately 

distances himself from his own ‘confessions’ by asserting that ‘This is not a 

biography/ It has fuck all to do with me/ It’s just a bunch of stories that relate to each 

other – don’t try to read anything deep or meaningful into any of this … I am not 

gonna be sharing any of my inner most secrets – or confessing any sins.’30 Yet, he 

immediately appeals to (and thereby exposes) our desire as spectators to witness 

‘Some dark, dirty sins that you will be shocked by … Some horrifying sins that make 



 9 

you feel so much more superior to me’, while he puts on a ‘balaclava as a 

confessional – kneels’.31 The repeated emphasis on ‘sins’ together with the symbolism 

of the balaclava, a ‘hyperbolic symbol of terror’32 typically used by Northern Irish 

paramilitaries, speaks to the specific context of the Northern Irish Troubles in which 

the perceived ‘sin’ of homosexuality (by both unionism/loyalism, if to a larger extent, 

as well as nationalism/republicanism) could, when disclosed, easily lead to 

homophobic hate crimes and killings, as addressed in both D.R.A.G. and Trouble.33 

The implication of the audience as potential voyeurs and consumers not only of his 

personal ‘sins’ but also ‘your sins … our sins’, furthermore, confronts them with their 

collusion in Northern Ireland’s ‘surveillance culture’, which, as Kathryn Conrad 

argues, while helping in the post-conflict context to make issues, such as sectarian 

hate-crimes, visible and bring them into the civic realm, still ‘impinges on privacy and 

bodily integrity as much as or more than the surveillance employed during the 

conflict.’34 This becomes evident in the following scene where we watch the 

performer carefully putting on make-up, slowly transforming him into ‘her’, thereby 

‘highlighting the process of creating ‘roles’ of any type, whether theatrical or 

social.’35 Here, again, the intimacy of the moment is abruptly ruptured when the 

performer ‘threatens [the] audience’ with a gun, exclaiming ‘Freaks’ in reaction to 

the perceived intrusion of his personal space by the public gaze of the spectators. The 

confrontation and shock is somewhat deflated when he playfully ‘winks at one cute 

man in front row’. Both scenes work to ‘queer’ these paradigmatic symbols of hyper-

masculine paramilitary sectarian identities through their subversive handling by a drag 

queen.36 However, both times these symbols are also used to expose the collusion of 

the audience with processes of voyeurism, making us, evocative of Seamus Heaney’s 

description in ‘Punishment’, complicit in ‘cast[ing] the stones of silence’.37 This 



 10 

complicity is brought to the fore in the Brechtian interlude ‘An Ode to Our Silence’ in 

which Boyd stands directly in front of the camera so that his ‘accusatory face’ is 

magnified onto the back wall, while recounting the crimes of what Rea describes as 

‘the serial killer of prejudice and bigotry within all humanity’.38 The last stanza 

directly addresses the present audience, thereby implicating them, as by-standers, in 

allowing violence against any kind of ‘other’ to continue to happen: ‘There is a serial 

killer loose in this town – he is killing people who go to strange experimental theatre 

shows in tiny venues.’39  

 

Comparable to Frank McGuinness’ queer dramaturgy in Carthaginians, which offered 

Rea an important inspiration, D.R.A.G. repeatedly engages its audience with painful 

memories of the Troubles as well as their contemporary resonances. Yet, its use of 

both ‘camp aesthetic and a campy drag-queen’ unsettles our reaction, creating 

laughter in the face of distress, as apparent in the audience reaction to the last stanza 

of the ‘Ode’ above. As Cregan argues, ‘These contradictory characteristics of camp 

allow it to function as a performative praxis in the queer project of unsettling what has 

become the normative approach to either histories, ideologies, or subjectivities. […] 

In its queerness, camp has the capacity to hold together what otherwise might be 

considered antithetical: the authentic and the theatrical.’40 As such, it provides not just 

a sense of ‘identity and togetherness, fun and wit’, but, as Richard Dyer suggests, 

camp must be also seen as form of ‘self-mockery’ (or even ‘self-hating’).41  This 

becomes apparent in the exaggerated parody of different types of gays that the 

performer depicts in a more and more frantic dance around the small stage set. This 

scene becomes something of a ‘play-within-a-play’, a ‘parallel game’ to the stage 

reality, self-consciously foregrounding these different ‘types’ as ‘roles’ in a way in 



 11 

which we recognise what Sontag calls ‘the metaphor of life as theatre.’42 At the end, 

the performer collapses on the heap of papers, expressing the ‘need write all this 

down –/ How we got here – got to be all these different people. Tell it the way it was 

– […] all the false turns and dead ends / All the abuse….and the laughs too’.43 Such 

an alternative historiography can be provided by a queer archive, to which Rea’s 

D.R.A.G. seeks to contribute. The pile of papers is intended to allude here to the many 

other untold stories that together show a potential to suggest ‘how things might start 

to be’.44 In this, D.R.A.G. evokes Derrida’s claim that the archive must involve ‘a 

question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a 

promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.’45 Yet, in the play itself, the process of 

memory-mapping an alternative queer future is forestalled by P’s reminiscences of the 

breakup of her relationship with her ‘beautiful closeted freedom fighter’. While this 

liaison between a drag queen and a hyper-masculine terrorist could be read ‘a 

sexualized metaphor for reaching across sectarian division of difference’,46 his parting 

letter emphasises the apparent inhospitality of consociational Northern Irish politics 

with a queer agenda in his new role as peacemaker-politician:   

 

Dear P 
I’ve been doing a lot of reading in here.  
I wanted to sort out in my head what happened and where we fitted. […] 
I think you are brave in your skirt 
Looking for something different – some other way of being […] 
But we’re fighting with our words now  
Taking it up to that place on the hill 
You’re stronger than I am 
You don’t need to follow the rules I do 
Sure maybe sometime in the future….47 

 

This incongruity is emphasised by the fact that in Rea’s play, it is this closeted gay 

lover who is imagined to be the killer of Darren Bradshaw, a police constable killed 



 12 

by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in May 1997. D.R.A.G. prepones the 

event so that the closeted killer can become part of the Agreement’s early release of 

prisoners scheme, effectively turning him from paramilitary to peacemaker – in effect, 

echoing the failure of the anti-discrimination legislation contained in section 75 of the 

1998 Northern Ireland Act to inaugurate substantive changes in the political culture.48 

At the time, the killing was justified by a member of the political wing, the Irish 

Republican Socialist Party, who was also gay in the following terms: ‘I have no 

problem with the attack.… He put on a police uniform and became part of a state 

which oppresses nationalists. His sexuality was irrelevant’.49 Yet, the murder 

happened in the leading gay club venue at the time, the Parliament (which is now 

Villa), which Bradshaw was known to frequent. At the time of the shooting, he had 

been suspended and his personal firearm had been taken away. The event caused a 

shock amongst the LGBT community in Northern Ireland, shattering the conception 

of gay bars as safe and neutral spaces.  

 

Notably, Bradshaw’s murder also marks the crucial turning point in Yee’s Trouble, 

emphasising their intertextuality. Like D.R.A.G., Trouble opens with Rea briefing the 

audience about its ‘rules’, which involve staying on the white lines on the floor and 

following the instructions of the ‘Pluckers’, a group of ushers who will direct the 

spectators to the different parts of the performance, the latter offering audience 

participation in a dance, which Rea suggests will be fun, thereby self-consciously 

setting us up for an unexpected ending. The set of the longer first part consists of a 

transparent cubic room, which is created out of scratched perspex – visually recalling 

an interrogation cell, as well as the iconic photograph of the ‘Soldier Behind Shield, 

Northern Ireland’ (1973) by Philip Jones Griffiths,50 thereby immediately situating the 



 13 

piece in a Troubles memorial context. On each of the four sides of this cube three 

video screens are installed: on the main screen, the edited verbatim testimonies of 

over 46 LGBT people are performed by a high-profile cast of Northern Irish 

performers, including, amongst many others, Paul Boyd, Marie Jones, and Carol 

Moore, and these are juxtaposed on the other screens with images of the past, 

specifically the Troubles but also ‘gay life’ from magazines such as Gay Times or 

Spare Rib, and repeatedly a stone wall, in grey or rainbow colour, as an iconic 

reminder of LGBT history.  

 

The audience is divided out between these four sides and asked to stand very closely 

together on the white lines, resonating with the space dynamics of the seating 

arrangements for D.R.A.G. The feed opens on all monitors with a moving torch song 

version of ‘Dance Yourself Dizzy’ by Ross Anderson, pitted to evoke what Rea 

describes as a ‘community spirit’, which foreshadows what is yet to come.51 The 

screens then jump into different feeds, so that each side is listening to a different set 

of memories while the acoustics, however, enable an overhearing of fragments of 

those other stories. In his review, Chris McCormack describes this as a ‘rush of 

repressed histories, released at once, threatening an overload.’52 The spatial acoustics 

and visual stimuli, with the flickering images on the monitors mantled on the 

translucent cube, in which the figure of an almost naked man (Andrew Stanford) sits 

still on chair with a table, telephone, and microphone, indeed have an overwhelming 

and almost disorientating effect on the spectator, whose focus and attention shifts 

from the different screens and their stories to those of the other sides and the inside of 

the cube, trying to individually make sense of these sensations.  

 



 14 

The testimonies on all sides are organised in a rough chronological order, addressing 

topics, issues, and experiences of religion; education; therapy; isolation; sectarian 

violence; organisations, such as Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association (NIGRA), 

Cara-Friend, and the Rainbow Project; queer clubs and discos; as well as HIV and 

AIDS.  Together, these testimonies tentatively trace what Yee describes as a ‘journey’ 

from ‘violence, loneliness, fear, isolation and the unspoken’ to ‘a place of community, 

acceptance, friendship and confidence (for some, a salvation).’53 I suggest 

‘tentatively’ because these stories refuse to be channelled into a clear and progressive 

trajectory that would provide a safe and stable memory. This movement has a spatial 

parallel in the way in which Belfast emerges in these memories from its traditional 

conception as a place of sectarian divisions as a possible space for alternative forms of 

togetherness, specifically through the reopened dance clubs in the 1980s. As one man 

(performed by Gordon Mahn) recalls:  

 

With it [the clubs] was a whole other culture, those on the  periphery of 
society. You did get the punks, you got skinheads, you got the gays, you got 
the lesbians, the androgynous-y whatevers, all thrown into this mismash one 
Saturday night at the Delta. It was really alternative. And alternative cultures 
just grew from that, it was really really exciting. That was part of the reason 
you went to the Plaza or the Delta was to meet people from the other side, 
from everywhere, from all over Belfast, which was quite exciting.54  

 

An ‘older, Belfast’ female voice (Katie Tumelty) confirms:  

 

I say the gay community was doing cross community then. They had the 
common the nominator [sic] was their sexuality. And as long as they were 
accepted for who they were didn’t matter about religion. Everybody was there 
and everybody was welcomed. Didn’t matter what tribe you came from. Even 
in the heart of the troubles, and I mean the heart of the trouble [sic] is, there 
wasn’t one tri-colour, not one union jack, nothing was brought into the gay 
community. That space. 

 



 15 

   

That ‘queer’ space and its promise of alternative communality beyond sectarian 

politics is, however, brutally shattered by the killing of Bradshaw that is addressed in 

the live performance of the exposed man who has sat the whole time inside the cube, 

which ends the installation part. As he slowly and carefully dresses himself in the 

uniform of an RUC officer, he recounts his experiences of homophobia in the police 

force and his encounter with the ‘very vulnerable’ young officer, Bradshaw, stating: ‘I 

just thought that if the [police] had looked after Darren better, the Parliament 

wouldn’t have been the only place he felt he could go that he was safe. That changed 

my life. His death impacted on me deeply. Because I felt we, the organization all the 

way to the top, and I had failed him.’55 The scene ends in blackout in which the 

audience is led over to another part in the room and asked to keep between two white 

lines on the floor that create a circle. As the ushers turn into dancers, the lights and 

soundtrack transform the scene into a disco, with the crowded surrounding audience 

transmuted into the present spectators, fellow clubbers, part of the club community. 

As suggested by Rea at the beginning, several members of the audience (some more 

cautiously than others) start to move to the rhythm and interact with the performance 

in this way. Suddenly, we notice actor Stanford on stage, his white shirt illuminated 

by a pink beam, and at first timidly, then more confidently, he joins in the dance – 

before he is killed by an invisible member of the crowd, the gun shot reverberating 

through the space. While a white spotlight freezes his paralyzed body, the disturbed 

audience is ushered out by the Pluckers, with several spectators being severely 

shocked and traumatized, some (almost) crying and comforting each other. The 

unexpected recreation of Bradshaw’s murder creates parallel sensations of threat, 

isolation, and rupture - as well as connectedness and communality. Thus, Trouble 



 16 

reproduces a ‘moving memory’, which, true to its multidirectional dynamics, does not 

endorse a progressivist vision to suggest how far we have ‘moved on’. Instead, the 

choice to conclude this testimonial work, which also evoked many redemptive 

memories, with this moment works to remind the audience of the current political 

dispensation in Northern Ireland – notably, the situation where, just prior to this 

premiere, the currently largest party in the Northern Irish Assembly, the Democratic 

Unionist Party (DUP), vetoed a proposal for legislating same-sex marriage. When the 

installation part of Trouble transferred to Belfast City Hall in December to celebrate 

the tenth anniversary since the UK’s first civil partnership ceremony there – namely 

of Shannon Yee and her partner56 – it, arguably, managed to parallel this trauma with 

a more hopeful memory.  

 

The endings of both productions inspire a form of social activism in raising awareness 

of the challenge LGBT memories bring to the present political situation. Where the 

conclusion of Trouble alerts us to the continuous inability of ethno-nationalist politics 

to redress LGBT justice, D.R.A.G. closes with Boyd’s powerful rendition of a ‘Punk 

Torch Song’, dressed in a bejeweled balaclava that he then rips off – an image that 

was used in slightly modified form as the promotion poster (see Figure 2): 

 

We’re not invisible now 
We’re here to be counted 
You’ll not be pushed to the ground 
If you’re lost 
You’ll be found 
Do you hear me? 
I won’t forget who you are 
Just hold your head up 
I’ll be the freak that’s unique 
Be the Queer without fear 
Can’t you see me?57 

 



 17 

As addressed here, both works trouble the invisibility, voicelessness, victimization, 

and oppression of the LGBT community in Northern Ireland. In performing 

previously silenced stories, the works under consideration unveil the parallel 

existence of hidden and marginalised memories within the ethnically structured polity 

and hetero-normative political culture of post-conflict Northern Ireland. Furthermore, 

in so doing, both problematise archival projects that, in an unintended way, may 

recycle the parallelism of exclusion and liminality. As such, the productions work to 

emphasise an archival and memorial responsibility to creating as well as commencing 

a different future. As Derrida reminds us: ‘as much as and more than a thing of the 

past, before such a thing, the archive should call into question the coming of the 

future’.58 

 

                                                      
1 I would like to express my deep gratitude to Niall Rea and TheatreofplucK for their 
kind support with this research by making scripts, recordings, photographs, and other 
information available to me and for permission to use this material for this article. I 
am also very grateful to Cillian McGrattan for invaluable feedback on an earlier draft 
of this paper.  
2 Shannon Yee, Unpublished Script of Trouble, October 2015.  
3 Shannon Yee, ‘Gay & Troubled?’ synopsis’, Shannonyee Blog 22 July 2011, 
shannonyee.wordpress.com/category/tr/ (assessed 23 May 2016).  
4 Ibid.  
5 ‘parallel, n., adj., and adv.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2016. Web: 
www.oed.com.queens.ezp1.qub.ac.uk/search?searchType=dictionary&q=parallel&_se
archBtn=Search (assessed 18 July 2016). 
6 David Cregan, ‘Remembering to Forget: Queer Memory and the New Ireland,’ in 
Memory Ireland, ed. by Oona Frawley (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010), 
pp. 184-94 (p.193). 
7 TheatreofplucK was originally known as ‘Pluck’ formed by Irish director/designer 
Niall Rea and American performers Karl Schappell, Robin Patchefsky and Jon Stark 
in 1998 in Philadelphia. As noted on the company’s website, ‘The name Pluck was 
chosen to honour the memory of Christopher Hawks who had lived with Rea and 
Schappell, but who died from AIDS shortly before the company was formed. Hawks 
would have undoubtedly been a core company member, and his catchphrase of "oh 
pluck!" when someone did or said something special or out of the ordinary or brave 
seemed to embody the ethos of our attitude to performance.’ After spending some 
time in Europe, Rea returned to Belfast in 2004, where the company changed its name 
to TheatreofplucK. In 2008, it was awarded a small grants award from the Arts 



 18 

                                                                                                                                                        
Council of Northern Ireland in 2008, making it the first publicly funded queer theatre 
company in Ireland. TheatreofplucK aims to produce ‘quality theatre for everyone, 
but with a queer slant’, especially ‘issues of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender 
identities in Ireland.’ To date, it has produced seven original full productions, details 
of which are on the website (see www.theatreofpluck.com/archive ).  
8 For a detailed discussion of this workshop version, see Fiona Coffey, ‘Blurring 
Boundaries and Collapsing Genres with Shannon Yee: Immersive Theatre, Pastiche, 
and Radical Openness in the North, in Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices by 
Women in Ireland, eds. by Miriam Haughton and Maria Kurdi (Carysfort Press, 
Dublin, 2015), pp. 135-150.  
9 The Stormont House Agreement (December 2014), available at 
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/390672/Storm
ont_House_Agreement.pdf (accessed on 3 April 2015). 
10 See Cillian McGrattan, ‘The Stormont House Agreement and the New Politics of 
Storytelling in Northern Ireland’, Parliamentary Affairs (2015): 1-19.   
11 Jacques Derrida, ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, translated by Eric 
Prenowitz, diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 9–63 (p. 9).  
12 Ed Madden, ‘Queering Ireland, In the Archives’, Irish University Review 43.1 
(2013): 184-221 (p. 185).  
13 The Agreement: Agreement Reached in the Multi-party Negotiations (Belfast/Good 
Friday Agreement), ‘Declaration of Support’, Paragraph 2, available at: 
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/136652/agree
ment.pdf (assessed 5 June 2016); Colin Graham, ‘Every Passer-by a Culprit?'’, Third 
Text 19: 5 (2005): 567 -580, (p. 667-8).  
14 Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (23 January 2009), p. 4; available at 
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/docs/consultative_group/cgp_230109_report.pdf 
(accessed 1 May 2016). 
15 See Robin Wilson, The Northern Ireland experience of conflict and agreement: A 
model for export? (Manchester: Manchester University press, 2010).  
16 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the 
Age of Decolonization (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 3. 
17 Eamonn Hughes, ‘Introduction: Northern Ireland – border country’, in Culture and 
Politics in Northern Ireland 1960-1990, ed. Hughes (Milton Keynes: Open University 
Press), p. 1; see also George Boyle’s chapter in this collection, ‘Northern Ireland: a 
place apart?’, pp. 13-26. 
18 Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, p.5. 
19 Berthold Brecht, ‘Short Description of a New Technique of Acting which  
Produces an Alienation Effect [1940]’, in Brecht on Theatre, ed. and trans. by John 
Willett (London: Methuen. 1964), pp. 136-147 (p. 136). Dominick La Capra’s 
concept of ‘emphatic unsettlement’ is also gestured to here, see LaCapra, Writing 
History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), p.78.   
20 See Fiona Coffrey, ‘Burring Boundaries’, p. 140ff. 
21 Al Head, ‘The queer fool,’ Sexualities, 15.1 (2012): 3-10 (p. 9). 
22 Niall Rea, Unpublished interview with author, 13 July 2016. 
23 See ‘Appendix IIIc: Secret Queer Devotions left by the Audience on the stage at the 
start of the show (all iterations)’, in Niall Rea, Queer Identity in Performance in 
Northern Ireland: Dissemination through Live Performance, with Attention to its 
Post-Conflict Context. PhD Thesis. Queen’s University, Belfast, 2016, pp. 343-350.  

http://www.theatreofpluck.com/archive
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/victims/docs/consultative_group/cgp_230109_report.pdf


 19 

                                                                                                                                                        
24 Rag trees in Ireland are often Hawthorn trees, close to holy wells or other symbolic 
geographical landmarks, which are covered in scraps of fabric, ribbon or clothing, 
representative of wishes, dreams, hopes or problems that are believed will be fulfilled 
or overcome as the rag disintegrates. 
25 Rea, Queer Identity, p. 200. 
26 Rea, Queer Identity, p. 201. 
27 In the post-show discussion at the Courtyard Theatre, Newtownabbey, on 6th 
August 2012, one audience member emphasised that he felt ‘terrified’ putting his 
piece of paper on stage but then became ‘curious as to how they would be used’ (Rea, 
‘Appendix II: Transcripts of Post Show Discussions’, in Queer Identity, p. 314).   
28 Rea, Queer Identity, p. 202. 
29 Jane Coyle, Review of Divided, Radical, And Gorgeous, Irish Theatre Magazine 
(2012). Previously available at: www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Current/D-R-
A-G----Divided--Radical-and-Gorgeous (website closed down in 2014). The review is 
reproduced in ‘Appendix V’ in Rea, Queer Identity, p. 422-24.  
30 Rea, ‘Appendix I – Annotated Performance Script of Divided, Radical, And 
Gorgeous – Third Iteration’, in Niall Rea, Queer Identity, pp. 264-281 (p. 265). [In 
the following abbreviated with Script of D.R.A.G.]. 
31 Ibid.  
32 Joseph Pugliese, ‘Biotypologies of Terror,’ in Cultural Studies Review, 14.2 (2008), 
49-66 (p. 61). 
33 For a detailed exploration of homophobia in Northern Ireland, see Marian Duggan, 
Queering Conflict: Examining Lesbian and Gay Experiences of Homophobia and 
Northern Ireland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).  
34 Kathryn Conrad, ‘“Nothing to Hide … Nothing to Fear”: Discriminatory 
Surveillance and Queer Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland’, in Ashgate 
Research Companion to Queer Theory, ed. by Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke 
(Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2009), pp. 329-46, (p. 342). 
35 David Cregan, Frank McGuinness’s Dramaturgy of Difference and the Irish 
Theatre, (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 141 
36 See Caitriona O’Reilly, ‘Politics, Pride and Performance: TheatreofplucK’s 
Devised Queer Dramaturgies in Northern Ireland,’ in Devised Performance in Irish 
Theatre: Histories and Contemporary Practice ed. by Siobhan O’Gorman and 
Charlotte McIvor, (Dublin, Carysfort Press, 2015), pp. 243-259 (p. 254). 
37 Seamus Heaney, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 38. 
38 Rea, Queer Identity, 155. 
39 Rea, Script of D.R.A.G., p. 272. 
40 Cregan, Frank McGuinness’s Dramaturgy, p. 127. 
41 Richard Dyer, ‘It’s Being So Camp As Keeps Us Going’, in Camp: Queer 
Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, ed. Fabio Cleto (Michigan: University of 
Michigan Press, 1999), p.110. 
42 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Camp, p. 56. 
43 Rea, Script of D.R.A.G., p. 279. 
44 Ibid. 
45 Derrida, ‘Archive Fever’, p. 27. 
46 Cregan, Frank McGuinness’s Dramaturgy, p. 140. 
47 Rea, Script of D.R.A.G., p. 279.  
48 See also Stefanie Lehner, ‘Post-Conflict Masculinities: Filative Reconciliation in 
Five Minutes of Heaven and David Park’s The Truth Commissioner,’ in Irish 

http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Current/D-R-A-G----Divided--Radical-and-Gorgeous
http://www.irishtheatremagazine.ie/Reviews/Current/D-R-A-G----Divided--Radical-and-Gorgeous


 20 

                                                                                                                                                        
Masculinities: Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. by Caroline Magennis and 
Raymond Mullen, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), pp. 65-76.   
49 Cited in David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and 
David McVea, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as 
a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Mainstream: Edinburgh, 2012), p. 1407. 
50 Exhibited in Northern Ireland: 30 Years of Photography by Belfast Exposed (in 
partnership with the MAC), 10 May - 7 July 2013. Photograph available on Maxim 
Surin, ‘Northern Ireland: 30 Years of photography. Belfast Exposed’, Blog:  
www.maximsurin.info/blog/northern-ireland-30-years-of-photography-bx (assessed 
23 July 2016). 
51 Rea, Unpublished interview with author.  
52 Chris McCormack, Review of Trouble, Exeunt, 16 November 2016: 
http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/trouble/ (assessed 20 November 2016).  
53 Yee, Unpublished Script of Trouble.  
54 Ibid.  
55 Ibid.  
56 BBC News, ‘Gay weddings' first for Belfast’, 19 December 2005, 
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4540226.stm (assessed 20 July 2016). 
57 Rea, Script of D.R.A.G., p. 281.  
58 Derrida, ‘Archive Fever’, p. 26. 

http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/trouble/
http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/4540226.stm

	I think you are brave in your skirt