Review of Cyprus Avenue (Play by David Ireland at Royal Court, watched online)

As part of lockdown we watched Cyprus Avenue last night, recorded at the Royal Court Theatre in London, though with some intercut scenes that looked like they were actually shot in Belfast. It was a a very effective and absorbing play, well acted, and cleverly arranged and adapted for broadcast. Stephen Rea is a great actor and he could probably read the telephone directory (er, do those even still exist?) and make it absorbing.

But there was something about the play's underlying message that I found disturbing. It's essentially an assault on the Ulster Protestant identity, arguing that it's a false identification with Britishness and an assertion of not-Irishness, and not much else. The main character, Eric, is both aware and afraid of this, and deals with it by increasingly aggressive and then dark assertions of that identity, and by a laughably stupid critique of Irishness that encourages us, the audience, to laugh at him and his ridiculous identity.

I'm not on safe territory here, but I think that characterising identities as felt as either 'real' or 'faux' is not going to work out well. There are lots groups of people who have identities based on the fact that they came from somewhere else - as immigrants, as refugees, as slaves and as settlers. In progressive circles we tend to celebrate the first three and denigrate the fourth - because settlers are somehow related to the agency of a colonial state. But the boundaries between these kinds of group are not clear and firm - what about indentured labourers who never go home, as in Guyana and Malaysia? What about people who came as migrants because of opportunities opened up by a state, but not through its agency - like the millions of Europeans who migrated to America in the nineteenth century?

The flip side of this is the idea of indigeneity - some people were there ab origine, and are felt to be part of the 'natural' landscape and living in harmony with nature, and some are settlers and therefore necessarily inharmonious. Which rather begs the question, when is the cut-off date? The Maoris turned up in New Zealand a little while before the Europeans, and more or less exterminated the aborigines there - and sent some of the native fauna into extinction. Same with the megafauna of North America.

Back to Northern Ireland - is it really helpful to seek to build an all-Ireland identity on the basis of lampooning one side of the sectarian divide, and assuming that your side's identity is inclusive? Or is it time to recognise that Republicanism, as currently constituted, is also a sectarian ideology, even when it's shorn of its mystical and Catholic dimensions?

Something similar occasionally happened in Israel/Palestine - rogue currents in Zionism (even Ben Gurion, sometimes) wanted to teach the Palestinian Arabs Hebrew and turn them into Israelis of the Muslim persuasion, and some Arab Nationalists have been willing to admit 'Arab Jews' as Arabs. It has come to nothing. Surely an opportunity to learn about going beyond nationalism and sectarianism in creating post-national identities?