Violence and Identity in Northern Ireland: Graham Reid's The Death of Humpty Dumpty

Violence and Identity in Northern Ireland: Graham Reid's The Death ofHumpty Dumpty LIONEL PILKINGTON We are not the masters of our own destinies. No one is totally innocent and no one is totally guilty. We are social animals and as members of a society responsible to some degree for that society ... our society. Il is often the choices we make, the options we select that determine the extent of our "guilt" or "innocence." Graham Reid' Graham Reid is one of the best known and most prolific of contemporary playwrights writing of the current crisis in Northern Ireland. Moreover, Reid's early stage plays, The Death ofHumpty Dumpty (1979), Dorothy (1980), The Closed Door (1980), and The Hidden Curriculum (1982), show a preoccupation with an arresting and widely accepted view of the crisis: the terrifying effect of paramilitary violence on individuals whose only relationship to the conflict is a relationship of fear. This article exantines the first and most enthusiastically received of these plays, The Death ofHumpty Dumpty.' Described by Lynda Henderson as "a social historian of the Protestant working class,'" Reid began his career as a dramatist writing for the Peacock and Abbey theatres in Dublin. The Death of Humpty Dumpty was first performed at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin on 6 September 1979 and then transferred to the larger Abbey stage in December. It was praised by reviewers as "probably ... the best piece of theatre to emerge from the sad situation north of the Border" 4 and as "one of the most important and accomplished ... in decades."s Irish Times reviewer David Nowlan, despite reservations about Reid's "uneven" writing, describes The Death of Humpty Dumpty as "powerful" and "superb,,6 and a recent survey of Irish drama by D.E.S. Maxwell names Reid's playas one of three Northern plays that achieve "distinctive transferences" of the crisis.' The play is praised in particular for its realism and lack of sentimentality. Henderson, for example, describes it as "a sharp psychological documentation" and argues that Reid's talent lies in the directness and immediacy with which his play portrays life in Northern Ireland.8 16 LiONEL ·PILKINGTON Set in contemporary Belfast, The Death ofHumpty Dumpty deals with the consequences ofa brutal paramilitary attack on a local secondary school history teacher, George Sampson. Sampson, a middle-class Protestant, is shot at point blank range on his doorstep not because of any political involvement but because he had earlier accidentally surprised a group ofparamilitaries in action. In the space of one terrifying scene, he is transformed from an active lover and an adored husband and father to a cripple paralysed from the neck down. The play's action that follows is concentrated on George's and his family's bitter difficulties in coping with this experience and, finally, on a recognition of its impossibility. Confined to a hospital bed and a wheelchair and unable to move any part of his body except his head, George is tormented by Willy, a sadistic hospital orderly, and befriended by Doyle, a working-class Catholic who has been crippled by a traffic accident. When Doyle dies and is then replaced in Part Two of the play by "Doyle's Voice," heard only by George and the audience, George reverts to mordant verbal abuse, directed mainly at his family. His wife Heather, daughter Judith and son David tolerate this behaviour until their discovery of a set of diaries in which George has documented various clandestine love affairs. David confronts his father about this in the final scene; accepting his father's marital infidelity but unable to tolerate any longer George's abuse or the alternative prospect of George permanently in a state of passive dependency, David concludes the action by suffocating his father with a pillow. The intensity of suffering in the play, and that of the final scene in particular, seems to confirm a view of violence as a self-perpetuating "madness"9 as well as demonstrate David's earlier insistence that the only solution to the Northern Ireland crisis is to emigrate: "Go away, emigrate. Do that or we'll all .end up cripples of some sort" (p. 38).00 "One leaves the...