A Night in November

... Is a play by Marie Jones, an East Belfast playwrite. I saw it recently and it blew me away. It's about a blue collar worker from East Belfast who loves nothing better than trying to humiliate his boss, who is Catholic and whom he resents for being promoted. He reluctantly takes his father in law to a football match between Northern Ireland and the Republic and is exposed to the most vile forms of anti-Catholic bigotry. The Protestant yahoos taunt the Republic fans by chanting 'Greysteel 8, Republic nil.' This is a reference to a shooting by Protestant paramilitaries at a pub in Greysteel that killed eight Catholics. The shooting was at Halloween, so the soccer fans also cheered: Trick or Treat.

Appalled by his fellow prods (and his father in law), our hero is forced to rethink the bigotry he's been surrounded by all his life. His childhood friend died--a hero--while planting a bomb in a Catholic pub. One of the most moving parts of the play was his admission that he can't disown or condemn his friend's violence when his friend was only using different tools to express the same hatred that he felt toward his boss. His friend didn't have an education and couldn't get a civil service job, like he did, so took a different path. But on a parallel track.

Our hero ends up going to America to see the Republic play Italy in the world cup--a joyful experience because the Irish fans don't intermingle sports and sectarian politics. He bonds with these blissfully happy Irish fans because they don't carry the baggage of his working class Protestant neighbours--angry, bitter, taunting.

I don't often leave a play thinking I should read it. But I'd like to read Marie Jones's work to capture all of it.

Sometime in June