The actor reveals deep-rooted passions as he talks about his role in Cyprus Avenue, what he learned from Samuel Beckett, Brexit and the Troubles
There is a poem by Tom Paulin called An Ulster Unionist Walks the Streets of London, in which the narrator articulates the shock of not-belonging he feels as he wanders lost through the British capital “like a half-foreigner among the London-Irish”. His British identity has been shaken to the core by the sudden realisation that, amid the multiplicity of ethnic identities that make up the city’s multicultural mix, he is categorised as Irish as soon as he opens his mouth.
I was reminded of the poem as I read Cyprus Avenue, David Ireland’s controversially violent play about Eric Miller, an ageing Ulster loyalist whose sectarian extremism has shaded into psychosis to the point where he thinks his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. In the play Miller recounts a similar, but even more confusing, crisis of identity he experienced on a business trip to London, when he wandered into an Irish bar filled with “English voices, cockney voices, calling themselves Irish”. To his utter surprise, he found himself enjoying the experience and, seduced by the heady atmosphere of inclusion, ended up drinking Guinness and singing Irish rebel songs.
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