Life and loss during the Troubles in spotlight as The Playhouse returns

The new production, Anything Can Happen 1972: Voices from the heart of the Troubles by Damian Gorman, will present extraordinary, previously-unheard stories about experiences of Northern Ireland in 1972.

The statistics for 1972 - the worst year of the Troubles - are astonishing: almost 500 killings (nearly 100 in the month of July alone); 10,000 shootings, 2,000 explosions and almost 5,000 people physically injured. But statistics don’t take you inside the hearts of people who were there. 1972 was an extraordinary year, when it felt like anything could happen, but it was a year of lives as well as deaths. Anything Can Happen 1972 is inspired by inside stories of both.

The production will be performed and broadcast live from the Playhouse from September 16, 2020 as part of The Playhouse’s PEACE IV Programme’s Theatre and Peacebuilding Academy.

The PEACE IV Programme is an EU funded Programme designed to support peace and reconciliation in Northern Ireland and the border region. It is managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB).

As part of the production, those who have lost people- in the Troubles, due to Covid-19, or in any circumstance- are invited to contribute to Anything Can Happen 1972. They are welcome to send objects or photographs of significance or importance to them, to be placed on the 130 empty chairs in the theatre. This act is so that the chairs have, other than absence, something very significant and important on them, to be lit by theatre lights in an act echoing Seamus Heaney’s famous work Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication, in which he describes ‘a sunlit absence’.

Kieran Griffiths, Producer/Director of the Playhouse, said: “Like a low-laying fog, grief has sat amongst us all this year. It’s grey, feels impossible to lift and kicking it sees it rise around us. Our plan is to honour that grief and to fight through with resilience and creativity to simply try and make something move. Fear of inertia was the catalyst and our mission to bring art to all will continue. Anything Can Happen 1972 is an act of love, of courage and its ‘sunlit absence’ is our way of spotlighting our missing audiences but also our theatre community in mourning.”

Damian Gorman, author of Anything Can Happen, said: “The empty chair is a very powerful symbol of loss and grief. Somebody defined grief to me as ‘love which has nowhere to go’. Rather than having all these empty chairs that would be housing absence, we would be housing something of significance. If all of that makes sense to you, please get in touch with us here at the Playhouse.”

Anything Can Happen is part of an ambitious new project announced today by The Playhouse.

As Covid-19 continues to create uncertainty and damage to the world of the arts, a theatre at the very edge of the UK scene is unveiling a new plan to enable it to survive now and thrive in the future.

The Playhouse, a 150-seat theatre, established in 1992, is an innovative, award-winning organisation with an international reputation out of all proportion to its size. Until Covid-19 arrived, the Playhouse was a thriving arts centre in the heart of Derry.

When lockdown began, everything stopped, immediately. Now, the Playhouse is bringing live performance back to the theatre with a new plan and programme of productions and events.

From next month, The Playhouse will begin a programme of live performances inside the theatre that will also be broadcast live, online, across the world via its newly installed live broadcasting infrastructure. All performances will be free to all subscribers to the Playhouse’s YouTube channel. And this approach will continue once the restrictions of the pandemic are lifted and the theatre is filled once again; it is the future for the Playhouse.

PROUD TO BE

The Playhouse’s new season will begin on 28 August with Proud to Be, an innovative new play created in lockdown by the poet and performer Mel Bradley and director Kieran Smyth. Proud to Be explores the diverse experiences of the LGBTQ+ community. This production will not be performed to a live audience, having narrowly missed the NI Executive’s newly announced date for the return of live theatre to an audience on September 1, but will be performed and broadcast live from the Playhouse stage.

The Playhouse’s online programme will include a wealth of behind the scenes films, artist interviews, access to rehearsal and broadcasts of past Playhouse productions, including Playcraft Live, the production that originally took the theatre across the world. The initial run of new productions will be screened free of charge to all viewers, with donations encouraged online, before inviting audiences to financially support their new online programme with an accessible new e-ticketing model.

Griff Rhys Jones, Patron of the Playhouse, said, “I’m proud to be associated with a theatre whose award-winning work is an ark for engagement, peacekeeping and education. During this rather strange time, the Playhouse has been making plans. It’s going to launch a digital Playhouse to bring education, engagement and theatre online. We need your help to build our audience online; you can do this by subscribing to our YouTube channel.”

Noirin McKinney, Director of Arts Development, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, added, “The Arts Council is proud to be Principal Funder of the Playhouse and to support this innovative programme, imaginatively curated during an extremely difficult time for theatres and the Arts in general.

“The Playhouse has spectacularly risen to the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic and through this impressive programme, continues to reach out to audiences, helping to bring great art from their house to ours.”