Staging Transition: Theatre and Transitional Justice in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

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Building on original research for my BA and MRes dissertations, this PhD explores the potential of theatre to 'act' as a means of supplementing/surrogating the objectives of transitional justice, and argues that the principles of Transitional Justice can enhance the role that the creative arts play in conflict transformation in Norther Ireland. This is especially important given the failure to agree an overarching mechanism to deal with the past as part of the Good Friday Agreement (1998). While the Stormont House Agreement (containing thirty separate recommendations on 'the past') was concluded in 2014, it has yet to be implemented; the result has been heavy dependence on the criminal justice and policing system to provide a 'piecemeal' delivery of truth and justice for victims and survivors. In the vacuum resulting from this political failure, artists and transitional justice initiatives have both sought alternative ways of dealing with the past; an overlooked critical and creative overlap that this interdisciplinary study will examine. Despite the analysis of the role of civil society in mobilising truth and justice often referred to as 'transitional justice from below' (McEvoy and McGregor 2008), there has been no systematic exploration of similar work in the field of theatre. Drawing upon the productions by Derry Playhouse, the Lyric and Kabosh theatres, this study will analyse a range of post-conflict plays/performances drawn from different forms and traditions; from site-specific performances to verbatim/documentary plays. This research will also consider the Playhouse in Derry's 'Theatre of Witness' Program which provides a testimonial platform for victims and survivors to tell personal stories on the public stage; equipping them with an agency that Transitional Justice seeks to achieve through alternative processes. I will also engage with the work of ex-combatants (such as Laurence McKeown, Bobby Niblock), with Kabosh and the Lyric Theatre, as this is a shared area of transitional justice in acknowledging the constructive role ex-prisoners can play in post-conflict society, and how much of this fictional work helps to 'rehearse' potential scenarios of political reconciliation in the 'real' world. I'll also consider theatrical works undertaken in collaboration with various victims' groups, community organisations, human rights bodies, and organisations explicitly involved in transitional justice such as Healing Through Remembering, WAVE Trauma Centre, and the Victims and Survivors Commission. My analysis of this extensive archive of post-conflict drama provides a fascinating foil to the reports and recommendations of transitional justice initiatives, from the work of HTR through to the Stormont House Agreement. In providing the first comparative study of theatre and transitional justice in Northern Ireland, this interdisciplinary study hopes to demonstrate how theatre and transitional justice foreground the performative power of testimony and the complexity of 'truth'. I hope to highlight the huge potential each field has for enriching the other, given their mutual interest in modes of memory and remembrance, trauma and testimony, victims' voices and agency. Given the centrality of storytelling to the essence of theatre and core practices of transitional justice, this study will comparatively analyse the methodological and conceptual approaches transitional justice employs to create and curate oral archives with those developed by theatre practitioners to generate testimonial/verbatim drama. To answer these research questions, I intend to diversify methodologies developed during my MRes thesis by conducting interviews with leading practitioners and scholars in the fields of theatre and transitional justice, as well as recording/analysing post-show discussions of relevant productions. This project will entail close co-operation with the Lyric Theatre, Kabosh, the Derry Playho