After Easter, a play by Anne Devlin

“After Easter” is the final part of “The Belfast Trilogy”, a set of plays by the Northern Irish playwright Anne Devlin (born 1951). The subject matter of the plays is the “Troubles” of the 1970s and 1980s as seen from a female perspective. The plays therefore echo the “Dublin Trilogy” by Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) which were based on the events surrounding the Irish Revolution of 1916-21.

The title “After Easter” is a further echo of the past, given that it was the Easter Rising of 1916 that, although it was a failure by virtue of being put down within a week by the British Army, lit the fuse that was eventually to lead to Irish independence in 1922. The symbolic importance of the Rising was massive, and it continues to be so to the present day.

Another significance of the title is a religious one, given that Easter is the Christian festival that celebrates the central event of the Christian story, namely the Resurrection of Christ. In the play, one of the characters (Greta) claims to see a vision on Pentecost Sunday, which is seven weeks after Easter.

The theme of the play is how Northern Irish Catholic women can come to terms with their past and the political background of their native city (Belfast) with its sharp divisions between Catholics and Protestants and the assumed loyalties that these impose on women who are expected to fall in line with the views and prejudices of their male family members.

“After Easter” follows the fortunes of three sisters, Aoife, Greta and Helen, who have chosen their own ways of dealing with these pressures in a process of self-healing. Aoife has chosen the domestic route by making a “safe” marriage and living not far from her parental home.

However, Greta and Helen have chosen to leave Northern Ireland and live in England, where they have found that having a Northern Irish accent is a distinct disadvantage at a time when many people on the British mainland were terrified of terrorist bombings and regarded anyone with such as accent with deep suspicion. Helen got round this difficulty by adopting an American accent instead.

The women had been brought up in a strongly Republican and Catholic household ruled by their father, a socialist and a man who sought to control every aspect of his daughters’ lives. They have now returned to Belfast to attend his funeral and must make decisions about where their futures lie.

Greta’s escape from her father’s influence had been to marry an English left-wing academic who encouraged her to abandon her Catholic faith. She has not coped well with the change in that she suffers from hallucinations that lead her into eccentric behaviour. For example, on her return to Belfast she steals communion wafers from a local church and hands them out to people waiting for a bus. She maintains that one of her “voices” told her to do this to “stop the killing”.

Greta’s mental instability is, however, compared with the more general madness of life in Belfast when her sister says: “In England they lock her up if she’s mad but let her go if she’s political. In Ireland they lock her up if she’s political and let her go if she’s mad”. This is not so much a political play as a psychological one, but this comment seems to be making a political statement that is not far removed from that of the Cheshire Cat in “Alice in Wonderland” when he compares the characteristics of dogs and cats (dogs growl when displeased and cats growl (or purr) when pleased) and concludes that “we’re all mad here”.

If Belfast is mad, then Greta, by showing symptoms of madness, is the only one who is truly sane, in that she belongs to her environment.

Helen’s response to the situation in Belfast was to make herself fit into a different environment, namely that of London society. However, she deliberately chose to adopt a persona that was neither Irish nor British, through the expedient of pretending to be American. She also refused to be labelled as anything that might connect her with her background, by not allying herself with any faction, be it religious, political or social.

The point made here is that London, being a melting-pot of every race, creed and proclivity imaginable, allows anyone, man or woman, to be exactly what they want to be and not be forced to choose between conflicting loyalties, which is the situation in Belfast. Helen is able, with justification, to say that she is “a citizen of the world” and that “You don’t have to stoop to other people’s expectations”.

Of the three sisters, Helen is clearly the strongest character. She is an artist who has financial as well as social reasons to throw off her past and adapt to the commercial world in which she can make a living. The fake American accent was in part a ploy to attract American buyers of her paintings. However, after her father’s death she feels able to make a voluntary decision to sell her London flat and return to Belfast. Her strength of character is sufficient, she believes, for her to be able to stand on her own feet in the otherwise stultifying atmosphere of Belfast. She also maintains that, in order to build a secure future, it is necessary to forget elements of the past. As an artist she believes that “It’s my memory that stops me from seeing, so I’m concentrating on forgetting”, and she also thinks that she can use her art to “create and free” whereas the attitude of the Irish political class, represented by her late father, had been to “seduce and dominate”.

Each of the three plays in “The Belfast Trilogy” has a strong element of autobiography, and Helen is clearly closest to the author in “After Easter”. Anne Devlin wrote the play in 1994, some nine years after the second play “Ourselves Alone”. Like Greta and Helen she had emigrated to Britain but it was not until 2007 that she was to follow the example of her characters and make the return journey. Even in 1994 the political situation in Northern Ireland was becoming easier, that being the year in which the Provisional IRA announced its ceasefire and the Peace Process began to make real progress. This was therefore a time of hope for an Easter-like resurrection of normality. The play offers a view of how the people of Northern Ireland, and particularly its women, might respond in personal terms.

The play ends with the thoughts of Greta, after she has had her hallucination at Pentecost. She fears that her father’s influence will always be there, but she also has hope because she is now pregnant. Her vision involves feeding a stag in a snowbound and frozen forest. The stag acquires human features and the snow and ice all melt away. As she says, the stag “took me to the place where the rivers come from, where you come from . . . and this is my own story”. She has therefore found healing for her mental state and been resurrected as a woman with hope for an untroubled future.

“After Easter” might not be the greatest play in terms of its dramatic qualities, and it might be thought of as being over-optimistic and even slightly pretentious, but it does make a powerful statement about the essential place of women in the rebuilding of a broken society. It is therefore worth the effort to see a performance, should one take place in one’s locality, or at least to read the text.

© John Welford