Stage: Culture Club

When writer/director/actor Declan Gorman wrote Hades as an immediate response to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 he had no idea it would turn out to be the first part of a trilogy of plays.

Nor could he have known that At Peace, the final instalment of what has come to be known as his Border Chronicles Trilogy, would be about life in a peacetime border community. Nor that it would have to involve a multi-ethnic cast.
He would also have been surprised to learn that At Peace would reflect the theatrical traditions and racial mythologies of the members of said multi-ethnic cast, So how, exactly, did this ground-breaking trilogy evolve?
“The first play really was an emotional and intellectual response to the Good Friday Agreement and the excitement of that moment in our history,” says Gorman. “I wanted to create a body of work about the border community, but never imagined it would be a trilogy,” he adds.
Yet around the time he wrote the second play, Epic, it became clear that there needed to be a third piece to wrap up the loose ends of the first two pieces. Unlike the first two works in the Border Chronicles Trilogy, this play deals with the multi-ethnic nature of life in modern Ireland. Nevertheless, Declan wanted to avoid the style of social realism that seems to have become the chosen form for many writers tackling this subject.
He says: “When I started to write the third part, initially I was again just writing about border people.”
Soon he realised however, that it would be impossible to write a play about modern Ireland without touching on immigration. “So it became a major and really difficult journey for me, because though I knew these people were here and knew a few of these folk, I had never really engaged with them.”
As the play starts, work on a cross border by-pass is being held up when a Nigerian ground worker discovers a well-preserved bog body in the soil.
“He discusses the find with an Irish archaeologist, an Irish engineer and a Latvian night watchman on the building site,” says.
As a result, the building site is closed for a couple of months because this is such an important find.
The intent, he says, is to explore the connection between the Ireland of the Celtic tiger and the Ireland of Celtic mythology. “There is an exploration between, on the one hand, the scientific aspects of this archaeological find and also the possible psychic or cosmic implications of that,” he says. “Each of these men, while they live in the here and now, seem to be some kind of incarnations, or version, or echoes of characters from ancient mythologies or ancient religious systems. It’s not social realism at all.”

At Peace opens at the O’ Reilly Theatre, Dublin 1 on September 19, then tours nationwide.