Unlikely play makes its debut in usual setting
IN the bowels of the Harland and Wolff Welders' Club on in east Belfast on Wednesday night, over many pints of lager and beneath the greatest concentration of Union flags that has ever been seen by man outside a Union flag-making factory, an unlikely debut took place.
Bobby ‘Beano’ Niblock, a former UVF member turned playwright, stood anxiously at the back of the bar as his first play, A Reason to Believe, was performed to proud punters who whooped and laughed at every wise-crack.
Ivan Little and Niall Cusack starred as Hector and Geordie, bored ex-cons wanting one last shot at notoriety.
They shared childhood antics, loyalist paramilitary involvement, time in Long Kesh and then eventless middle-age and frustration with life’s grey, groundhog grind.
Niblock’s play follows the best mates as they both discover they have cancer, which makes playing dry-eyed hard men even more difficult than usual, and forces them to realise that “procrastination is the death of time”.
Outside prison and loyalism they feel like fish out of water, aimless and on the verge of total despair until Hector (Ivan Little) hatches a plan.
In one last attempt to revisit their out-worn ‘bad boy’ personas they stage a weirdly polite robbery and wind up in the cancer ward panicking between rounds of chemo when a policeman arrives to question a woman in a bed nearby.
The conclusion is hilarious and unexpected and talking about it too much would only ruin your enjoyment when you go to see it.
Which you will and must if you have any interest in loyalist, blackly comic, unapologetically working-class theatre.
Former community worker Jim Wilson thoroughly enjoyed the performance and said a loyalist perspective on prison life was long overdue.
“We all went to see the Chronicles of Long Kesh by Martin Lynch last year and, since then, many people in our community have felt the lack of a loyalist view on things” he said.
“Republican writers have had success so why shouldn’t we?
“People might try to pre-judge Beano because he served time but you have to remember that if it’s OK for former republican terrorists to be in government and write books, then why can’t former loyalist paramilitaries be playwrights?
“I thought the play was really funny and represented loyalist views. Everyone at the club had a great night.”
Bobby Niblock – a former UVF member who served 17 years at the Maze before his foray into writing – has given loyalist ex-prisoners a place and voice on the stage.
He can do quick-witted slegging and ex-con banter with purpose and heart, but the real achievement of A Reason to Believe is the way it treats serious issues with lightness of touch and simplicity.
Hector and Geordie can find no place in society that will grant them full acceptance and forgiveness for the criminal mistakes made in their youth; it is this isolation that makes them want one last robbery – their warped version of refusing to go gently into that good night.
And the earthy play brings the scourge of cancer into focus without any of the sugar-coated lies required to make audiences comfortable.
Hector and Geordie try to keep each other laughing despite the vomiting, diarrhoea, exhaustion, anger at fate and the body’s vulnerability that is nature’s nasty gift to the cancer patient.
Bobby Niblock’s A Reason to Believe was given a standing ovation at the Harland and Wolff Welder’s Club, which says everything about how the playwright’s wit pleased those on his home turf.
A Reason To Believe will be at the Culturlann on the Falls Road on August 2 and 3 as part of the West Belfast Festival (tel 9028 4028), and the Spectrum Centre, on the Shankill Road, on August 4 and 5 (tel 9050 4555).
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Weather for Belfast
Tuesday 14 February 2012
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