Dramatic Strategy in Christina Reid's Tea in a China Cup

Dramatic Strategy in Christina Reid's Tea in a China Cup DIDERIK ROLL-HANSEN It was in the early 1980s that critics interested in Irish drama began to focus their attention on Belfast and the "quality and vigourofthis resurgence in new drama out of, or about, the North." Northern Ireland, we were told, had seen a "recent accumulation of a body of work with evident roots in the crisis."! Brian Friel had fictionalised the disaster of Bloody Sunday in The Freedom of the City (first staged in 1973), a play that exploits the ironic contrasts between the racy humour of three Civil Rights marchers, sheltering in the Mayor's parlour of the Guildhall of Derry City, and the pompous hypocrisy of the upholders of law and order, who try to explain away the killing of these three marchers in "a fifteen-second burst of automatic fire," when they obey orders and come out into the open. Bill Morrison, four years later in Flying Blind, both farce and serious drama, explored the paralysing impact of the Troubles on a group of Belfast intellectuals, who suddenly find themselves caught in the thick ofa clash between two warring gangs ofterrorists, the young I.R.A. volunteers as quick-witted and well-spoken as the loyalists are coarse and illiterate. Fear and frayed nerves, internecine violence, broken marriages, and frustrated love across the divide between Protestants and Catholics - these are the themes developed in J. Graham Reid's The Closed Door (1980) and Remembrance(1985). The cross-examination ofan I.R. A. detainee by R. U.C. officers provided first Martin Lynch and then Ron Hutchinson with the pattern for exciting drama in, respectively, The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (1982) and Rat in the Skull (1984), both plays shocking us by the noise and the nastiness of the interrogations, and both vibrantly alive with harsh Belfast humour and resourceful verbal inventiveness. In the midst of this male-dominated Belfast drama it is a relief to find a woman playwright whose main interest is the human and social background of the Troubles, and in whose plays women are allowed to speak, not only occasionally, but quite often most of the time. "Are you a feminist writer?" a 390 DIDERIK ROLL-HANSEN journalist asked Christina Reid. "I'm a female writer," was her answer.' She explains that she is "worried about the trend to portray Ireland through its violence so all you see are the Troubles and you lose sight of the people." Reid is an exceptional woman with an exceptional career. Born in 1942 in a Protestant Belfast working-class family, she has fond memories of her mother and grandmother, who were both, she says, great storytellers. At the age ofnine she was given a five-year diary and proceeded to fill it, not with accounts of her daily doings, but with stories about what she would have liked to do. The plots, themes, and moods tried out in this diary of an imaginary life eventually helped to inspire her professional creative writing, her short stories for BBC Radio 3, for example, or her TV play, Did You Hear the One About the Irishman? (1980), soon to be revised for the stage as a one-act play. But that was many years later. Christina at 15 decided to explore the realities oflife in Belfast. She left school to work in "various boringjobs," as she now tells us - in a soft drinks company, in the clothing trade, and for a time she was a civil servant. Then she got married and raised three daughters, went back to school in her mid-thirties to take "0" and "A" levels, and subsequently studied English, Sociology and Russian Studies at Queen's University, but for one year only. Writing and the co-directing of her own plays have so far prevented her from finishing the course. In 1983-4 she was writer in residence at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, and that year became her breakthrough as a playwright. It was then that the same Lyric Theatre staged the world premiere of Tea in a China Cup. There are good reasons why this play should be singled out for a...