Loyal Women ( Archived )

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Pictured from L to R: Michelle Fairley, Cara Kelly, Clare Cathcart, Lisa Hogg, Stephen Kennedy

Photography by Ivan Kyncl

The female face of loyalism

It is comforting to imagine that the murderous loyalties and barbarous sectarian violence that have dogged Northern Ireland for so long are at least the preserve of bone-headed men.

Gary Mitchell, who has chronicled the dour values of working-class Belfast Protestants in a series of shatteringly powerful plays exposing the fault-lines in the peace process, knows better.

He grew up and still lives on the vast Rathcoole estate, knows its denizens intimately, and writes with the scorching authority of lived experience. And in this drama it is UDA women, rather than UDA men, who scare the audience.

The action is set in the home of Brenda Ford, a 33-year-old woman with far more on her plate than anyone could possibly need. Her husband has just been released after serving 16 years in jail for the murder of a Catholic woman, only to be promptly unfaithful to her. Her sulky, single teenage daughter has a young baby, and shows no inclination whatever to look after it. Her mother-in-law is bedridden with a wandering mind. And now the members of the Women’s Local Ulster Defence Association have got their hooks into her.

Like Ibsen and Arthur Miller, Mitchell superbly shows the ways in which the past catches up with the present and infects it. In her cosy home, with its naff ornaments and Christmas lights, Brenda seems altogether admirable, coping with a harsh life with enormous guts. But she has a very different past. As she tells her daughter, her priorities were once Protestants, Ulster, the Queen and Britain, and she was prepared to kill for them. Now she wants out, and to concentrate on her family, but the UDA comes knocking at their door demanding one last pound of flesh.

A young Protestant woman n the estate has been having an affair with a Catholic man who may be a member of the IRA. The girl must be persuaded to dump her lover, and it is Brenda who is given the unenviable task.

It would be unfair to give too much away. Mitchell has an old-fashioned belief in the power of a decent plot, and though it takes time to lay out his complex back-story, the action builds, in Josie Rourke edge-of-your-seat production, into a series of shattering confrontations as Brenda faces up to her husband, her daughter, and her fellow UDA members in a desperate fight to the finish.

I have sometimes thought that in repeatedly concentrating on such an apparently small world as Northern Ireland Protestantism, Mitchell might be selling himself short. Surely there are other richer fields to explore? But it is clear that Mitchell has everything he needs for potent drama in his own back yard.

Few are as astute in showing the vexed relationship between the personal and the political, and the way our lives are defined, and confined, by the choices we make. There is an unflinching moral toughness in his work, an absolute refusal to go for the soft option or the easy answer. And his writing grips. The sight of his UDA women gathering like members of the Mothers’ Union and sincerely saying their prayers before planning their unspeakable acts, and the drama’s devastating climax, are both equally unforgettable.

Michelle Fairley gives a tremendous performance as Brenda, brilliantly capturing a woman pushed to the edge, and using the ferocity of character that once made her bad to make her strong.

Lisa Hogg gives a terrifyingly plausible account of brain-dead selfishness as her mardy daughter, and there is terrific work too from Stephen Kennedy as the feckless husband, Julia Dearden, Clare Cathcart and Cara Kelly as the terrifying UDA women and Sinead Keenan as their hapless victim. What a superb night of theatre this is.

Charles Spencer

The Daily Telegraph 12 November, 2003

We pin our faith in the peace process. But Gary Mitchell’s plays offer a vivid portrait of entrenched attitudes in a north Belfast Protestant community. And what makes his new play even more shocking than The Force of Change, which dealt with the RUC, is that it shows how women are not simply victims of a brutal male ethos but actively replicate it.

Mitchell’s heroine, Brenda, certainly has a lot to cope with. Her faithless husband is just out of jail after 16 years. She also has to deal with her bedridden mother-in-law and her teenage daughter’s six-month-old baby. As if this were not enough, as treasurer of the women’s local UDA branch she is expected to arbitrate in the trial of a Rathcoole estate girl, Adele, whose boyfriend is an IRA suspect.

Clearly Mitchell is saying that women, marooned in the midst of the loyalist culture, face an impossible task: they are expected to be simultaneously wives, mothers, nurses and unblinking patriots. But the two most disturbing scenes show the interrogation of the aberrant Adele. While Brenda tries to use rational persuasion, her two henchwomen, Gail and Heather, can hardly wait to tar and feather the mutinous victim. And when Adele tells Heather, “You’re a bigot”, the latter coolly replies, “No, I not I just hate taigs.”

…Josie Rourke’s production pinpoints the role of women as both products and perpetuators of the loyalist ethos with clinical accuracy. And while Michelle Fairley holds the play together as Brenda, there is strong support from Julia Dearden as the coldly bureaucratic UDA boss and from Clare Cathcart as her vengeful deputy.

Michael Billington

The Guardian 12 November, 2003

Belfast, 2003. The women branch of the UDA is looking for a treasurer and the group has just voted Brenda in. Brenda has an invalid mother-in-law, a lazy daughter and a granddaughter to contend with; then there’s a husband just out of prison, who has already slept with a neighbour, and an increasing lack of conviction in the WUDA cause. And group pressure is intensifying because of questions around estate resident Adele boyfriend, a suspected member of the IRA.

Gary Mitchell’s play starts softly and ends horribly. Some of the relationships are thinly sketched but, as it develops, the portrait of women with nothing in their lives except a thuggish political purpose is harrowing.

Michelle Fairley is excellent as Brenda, who has spent years trying to redeem her past, while director Josie Rourke creates just the right nauseating backdrop of domestic tension and physical intimidation.

In placing women at the front line, Mitchell’s uncompromising vision of the way a community is prepared to sacrifice blood ties and sisterhood for a cause few of them really understand, gives the familiar modern Irish political play an unexpected, provocative and ultimately moving new twist.

Claire Allfree

Metro 13 November 03

Union of Troubled Natures

In placing women at the front line, Mitchell uncompromising vision of the way a community is prepared to sacrifice blood ties and sisterhood for a cause few of them really understand, gives the familiar modern Irish political play an unexpected, provocative and ultimately moving new twist.

Gary Mitchell’s disturbing play exerts a slow and stealthy grip upon you attention.

It takes time and four scenes before you realise precisely the author intentions. Mitchell vividly portrays the Women Local UDA as masculinised, replicating the fierceness, violence and flinty intransigence of their monolithic male counterparts.

At first, though, the mood and style is that of a domestic Ulster drama, and everyday story of working-class Protestant women folk, their particular stresses and strains, values and views. There is more than a whiff of serious soap opera about the emotional and erotic entanglements of these lives in Josie Rourke’s beautifully pitched and acted production.

The existence of Michelle Fairley’s grim, gaunt Brenda Ford revolves around an apparently unemployed teenage daughter, Jenny (cool Lisa Hogg), who neglects her own infant upstairs. Brenda’s prematurely senile mother-in-law, Rita, lies in a makeshift bedroom, which is intermittently separated from the parlour by net-curtaining: Christopher Oram’s windowless, domestic set looks too grandly spacious and the backcloth of blue sky seems irrelevant.

But the sense of domestic tension rises interestingly. Brenda’s estranged husband, Terry, (Stephen Kennedy) recently released from prison after serving nearly two decades for murder, looks in to spread a little unhappiness. He riles his wife and jealously goads Mark, a young builder who hopelessly dotes upon the lady of the house.

Mitchell, who won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright award for The Force of Change in 2000, has already written in a spirit of critical compassion about the tense, polarised dogmatics of Ulster. Once the local leaders of the Women UDA come calling the play begins to relate Brenda’s secret, violent past to her present-day role in policing relations between Protestant women and Catholic men.

Sinead Keenan’s powerful, teenage Adele, found guilty of associating with a suspicious Catholic, is subjected to a process of questioning, intimidation and harassment by the prayerful, vicious UDA women who finally turn to violence.

Loyal Women, which makes full, ironic play upon the adjective in the title, has a slight tendency to melodrama. Valerie Lilley’s Rita whose senility proves to be skin-deep and the self-sacrificial Terry prove to be more contrived than convincing characters.

The value of Mitchell’s fascinating revenge drama is discovered in its sharp expose of a fearful Protestant working-class mind and heart set.

Nicholas de Jongh

The Evening Standard 12 November 03