A Night in November was first produced at Whiterock theatre, in Belfast, in August 1994, amid the tensions of the recently established ceasefires, before transferring to the Tricycle theatre in London in March 1995, where it was
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considered sufficiently successful to be brought back in July 2002. Marie Jones’
play has had a number of other productions, in England, Eire, and elsewhere, most recently at the Trafalgar Studios in London where it opened in October 2007, with the Northern Irish stand-up comedian, Patrick Kielty, playing all the parts. The play is a monodrama, requiring only one actor to perform over thirty characters, all seen through the eyes of a central character, Kenneth. He is an embittered Belfast Protestant dole clerk, who initially relishes his petty vic-timization of unemployed Catholics, and resents his Catholic boss, Jerry, who will ‘never be one of us’ (Jones 2000: 68). However, when Kenneth attends the November 1993 World Cup football qualifier between Northern Ireland and Eire, he is appalled when some of the Northern Irish supporters start to chant
‘trick or treat’, this being a reference to the real events, the previous month, when seven people were shot dead in the Rising Sun pub in Greysteel by mem-bers of the Protestant paramilitary group the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force):
… it’s beyond words, it’s beyond feeling … I’m numb … Greysteel seven Ireland nil … trick or treat … men walk into a pub on Halloween, shout Trick or Treat, and mow down seven innocent people and these fuckin’ barbarians are laughin’ … surely to God, surely to Christ these are not the people I am part of … no, it’s not, don’t tell me, I’m not hearing them, I’m not for I can’t fucking handle it …
(Jones 2000: 72–73) Disgusted also by his wife, and his father-in-law, who support the crowd, Kenneth decides to fly to the USA for the 1994 World Cup finals, to join
‘Jackie’s Army’. During the finals he finally accepts a new, all-embracing, Irish identity.
Superiority comedy, or Schadenfreude, is the principal comic device in the first half of A Night in November. From the beginning we are invited to experi-ence ‘some eminency’, in Hobbes words, in comparison with Kenneth’s petty self-importance, known even to his wife:
That day started like every other day starts out … check under car for explosive devices … you have to keep one step ahead of the bastards … […] For dear sake Kenneth, who would want to blow you up?
I am a government employee.
You’re only a dole clerk Kenneth, will you catch yourself on.
(Jones 2000: 63) Gary Mitchell has commented on what has often been seen as Protestant resist-ance to the arts and arts education. In his play, Remnants of Fear, for example, Charlie, a liberal who supports the peace process, argues with his hard line brother about the different attitudes between Loyalist and Republican prison-ers, from the UDA (Ulster Defence Association) and the IRA (Irish Republican Army), respectively:
The IRA young men were studying. They were actually bringing in lec-turers from Queens. Professors. While they were doing that the UDA young men were marching in circles, playing snooker, lifting weights and doing drugs.
(Mitchell, 2005: 130)
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47 Tim Loane, the former artistic director of the Lyric, and whose play Caught
Red-Handed shall be considered later in this article, offered this explanation, suggesting that Belfast is:
… a city built upon industry, upon nuts and bolts, ropes and steel-works. The psyche of the city, the psyche of the North of Ireland, is one that is about concrete things to do with certainty and belief and faith and unshakeable things […] so that psyche does not lend itself to creative writing, or creativity in many ways, because creativity is asking questions, raising doubts, saying that there is uncertainty and saying that there are things over and above concrete and steel that are important.
(Loane, quoted in McDowell: 15 May 2005) In his radio play Stranded, Mitchell comments how Protestantism, despite its origins in the Reformation, had, in Northern Ireland, reached a position where intransigence overpowered any urge for change:
There is no work now, that is what we have been told and we always believe what we are told, as long as it is Protestants telling us this … When was it that we first said ‘Ulster says no’? 1916? 1921? 1995?
I don’t know. If a culture refuses to change, can it progress? Quakers – are they stranded in time? No TVs, no cars. Quakers say no? I don’t think so … I once believed in a Protestant country for a Protestant peo-ple but the man I worked for drove a German car, watched American films on his Japanese TV, while eating a Chinese meal. There’s some-thing wrong here. Do Protestants make movies? Do Protestants make cars? If not, why not? Was it because someone said no and we all backed then up? I can’t remember, but I can remember saying ‘no’.
No United Ireland, No Pope here, No surrender. No change. No, no, no, no!
(transcribed by the author from audio recording:
BBC Radio 3, 11 August 1995) In A Night in November, these problematic attitudes to change and questioning, are satirized when Kenneth, for example, is surprised when visiting the house of his Catholic boss, Jerry, to discover that his books are not ’in size order or colour’ but ‘look like they have been read’ (Jones 2000: 83); unlike Kenneth’s
‘burgundy leather bound classics … never opened, but they suit the bookcase, match the wallpaper, blend in with the carpet …’ (Jones 2000: 83). While this may appear to offer a form of social identity comedy, a form of incongruity, this would be a mistake, for this forms part of a series of events, at which we are invited to experience some sense of Hobbesian ‘eminency’: including Kenneth’s pettiness, his wife’s social climbing; his father-in-law’s casual, and wholly irra-tional, prejudice. We are offered no contextualization for Kenneth’s reaction, but, instead, encouraged to laugh at such ignorance, especially so perhaps as
‘we’ are in a theatre, demonstrating our cultural capital.
Kenneth’s petty victories include joining the golf club from which Catholics are barred, much to the approval of his wife: ‘… tonight I am member of the golf club and at last she can up her status at aerobics’
(Jones 2000: 75) Similarly, the British military presence is belittled, but only
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through the voice of Jerry: ‘Look, this is bloody ridiculous, will you please come out from under my rhododendron bush, it is bright lilac and youse are dressed in khaki, did youse learn nothing about camouflage …’ (Jones 2000:
89). However, the narrative arc shows Kenneth’s growing self- awareness, and self-disgust, so the comedy of superiority shifts to him commenting on the ludicrous behaviour of others, not through the voice of Jerry, but as himself:
Yes … it was like that when I was growing up … as soon as the news came on my ma reached for a brush … automatic reaction … don’t lis-ten … just keep cleaning and everything will be alright … we have been protected by hoovers and brushes all our lives …
(Jones 2000: 90) Kenneth’s growing anxiety and self-hatred reaches a climax:
I wanted to scream, wanted to jump up on the counter with a thousand giros in my hands and throw them at the people … here, go on, take the money, take the money and spend it on whatever you like … I felt I was standing there for hours just fantasising what I could do if I wasn’t a stupid soul-less little prick … if it was even possible to change … was it … is it?’
(Jones 2000: 77) The relief theory of the comic, according to Carr and Greeves, is rooted in primeval survival instincts and ‘mirrors the leap from perceived threat to no threat’ (Carr and Greeves 2006: 23). It is, in fact, a sort of peace process. In the second half of the play it is relief comedy that dominates. Once Kenneth makes the decisions to leave Belfast, without telling his wife, to support the Republic of Ireland at the World Cup he is filled with exuberance, a child-like joy and happiness: ‘I was in that car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang when it came to the edge of the cliff, it took wings … that was me’ (Jones 2000: 96).
In America he enthusiastically joins in with singing ‘stick your pizza up your arse’ (Jones 2000: 106) following Ireland’s victory over the Italians; the vicious-ness of ‘trick or treat’ has been replaced by relatively good-natured rivalry. He musters the courage to tell another Irish supporter that he is a Protestant;
‘So am I’ (Jones 2000: 101) is the reply. Concern is proved to be unfounded, and Kenneth can relax, as do the audience, whose attention is centred on the lone performer. The play ends with Kenneth’s ecstatic affirmation of his new identity: ‘I am free of it, I am a free man … I am a Protestant Man. I’m an Irish Man’ (Jones 2000: 108).
Given the fragile state of the peace process when A Night in November was first produced, there is little doubt that this was a brave and impor-tant play. The celebration of the Irish football team, at the time largely full of second or third generation emigrants based in England, represented an important reclaiming of the Irish diaspora. Moreover, by acknowledging Kenneth’s pain, and demonstrating the joy to be had in freeing oneself from bigotry, the play sent out an important message. However, its continuing success, especially with English audiences is problematic, in its simplis-tic depiction of both sides of the community: Kenneth’s Protestant wife and Ernie, his father-in-law, are deeply prejudice, the latter virulently so;
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49 whereas Catholic Jerry and the supporters of the Irish football team are kind
and tolerant. The play asks us to see loyalism as a sort of ‘false conscious-ness’ (Maguire 2006: 155), as it does the British presence on the island of Ireland. Maguire also quotes Robin Greer’s review that the ‘implication is that hatred and intolerance is only [done] by the ugly and bloodthirsty bar-barians of the Protestant community’ (Maguire 2006: 154). Characterization is conditioned by seeing everything through Kenneth’s eyes, and Maguire comments on the nature of monodrama, that it ‘draws the audience to the performer, and encourages them to subscribe to the control he exerts’
(Maguire 2006: 154 ). Parkinson in Ulster Unionism and the British Media (1998) comments on ‘Unionism’s failure to project its case’ (Parkinson 1998:
161) and of the British public’s ‘broad indifference to the political wishes of loyalists’ (Parkinson 1998: 161). This indifference is surely exacerbated by the comedy: the joy of experiencing Kenneth being finally ‘free of it’ (with its almost orgasmic climax reminding us of Freudian associations between humour and the libido); the relief that he has overcome his intense anxi-ety; and the pleasure at ridiculing bigotry and snobbery. The audience is encouraged to share what is a vastly simplistic view of cultural difference in Northern Ireland. Carr and Greeves cite an academic study about comedy leading to a possible lessening of critical engagement:
A recent study by Professor Robin Dunbar found that laughter raised people’s pain thresholds. His explanation is that shared social laughter causes an endorphin rush and the release of oxytocin to the brain … Endorphins are natural opiates. They make us feel relaxed, encourage social and sexual interaction and increase our level of trust.
(Carr and Greeves 2006: 22) So, we trust Kenneth and ultimately feel relaxed, and, of course, happy – this is, after all, a comedy – despite what is a troubling play that ignores impor-tant issues. These may be said to include: the diversity within Protesimpor-tantism (Roman Catholicism is, and has been for a long time, the largest single faith group in Ulster, with the Protestant churches split into various denomina-tions); and English historical culpability in fostering prejudice (phrases such as ‘no surrender’, used by Kenneth’s father-in-law, are there to be laughed at, with no awareness that this rallying call against the Home Rule movement was used, by English propagandists, to recruit Ulstermen during World War I for the killing fields of France). However, we have been encouraged to be relaxed and trusting and ignore such troubling problems.
Michael Billig in Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (2005) stated that ‘The idea of a critical approach to humour sounds some-what sinister. It suggests bossiness or craziness … [determining] some-what should and should not be laughed at’ (Billig 2005: 1). As a result, Billig claims that
‘common-sense assumptions’ (Billig 2005: 2, 5) are inherent in much dis-course on the comic. The assumptions Billig highlights include the supposed benefits of comedy, saying, that there is ‘widespread positive evaluation of humour in today’s popular and academic psychology’ (Billig 2005: 5). Billig states that ‘only joking’ and ‘just kidding’ are among the most used phrases in the English language, as though comic discourse is subject to some lesser form of scrutiny. A Night in November is an example where comic success has perhaps not been wholly positive, but has been at the expense of important ideological, and cultural, complexity.
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