Their Own Stories: Belfast, the Troubles, and a New Theatre

Speaker: Joan Weber

During the Troubles, Belfast’s working-class communities barricaded themselves in behind furniture and burned-out lorries, and the neighborhoods behind those barriers became their own worlds. In the middle of trauma, street by street, they needed to tell their own stories — and in church halls and community centers, that need produced a dramatic form that the rest of the world didn’t know it needed: a small number of actors playing every voice in the story, requiring nothing but language, physicality, and the audience’s imagination. This talk traces the form itself — what caused it, what it made possible, and what it left behind — through the work of Martin Lynch, Marie Jones, Owen McCafferty, and the communities that devised their own theatre into existence.

In 2012 and 2013 Joan Weber served as dramaturg and activities coordinator for the Armagh Project, an IEI Media playwriting and poetry residency in Northern Ireland for American college students, whose work culminated in public performances at the John Hewitt International Summer School, where she conducted the site research that grounds this talk.

Image: The Bogside, Derry — ‘Petrol Bomber’ mural, one of the People’s Gallery murals | Photograph by Joan Weber, 2012–2013​