The Irish Troubles

 I have decided to publish a note I wrote by way of introduction to my play, 'Horseman, Pass By'. It gives the basic motivation I had in writing it. If you find it of interest you can look at the script which I am putting on one scene at a time in seperate hubs.

Horseman, Pass By   A Preamble.

When, what we in Ireland refer to as ‘the troubles’, broke out in 1969 (again), the most common response from those outside of them was, “Where did all this come from?”

On television what was seen were very ordinary looking street scenes with very ordinary looking onlookers at the edges of the screen. And then the building in the middle-distance would be blown to smithereens. If you had just walked into a room and missed the newsreaders introduction to the footage you might well have thought that you were seeing a scene from a Bruce Willis film, except that it was not as well choreographed as Hollywood would have done it. (Why, for instance, hadn’t the director told the onlookers to look ‘horrified?’)

‘Horseman, Pass By’, was written to, in it’s own limited way, answer that question.

It is set almost exclusively within the limits of one family who are, at one and the same time, at the heart and at the edges of those momentous events.

 In the ‘Bruce Willis’ version the building would have been blown up by an unspeakably evil bastard played by Dennis Hopper or Alan Rickman; but in the real-life version the whole event was likely drawn up and planned on the kitchen table of Mrs. Quinn by her son Brendan while she was in bed. 

People being the way they are, (loath to admit to simple ignorance and not bothering to find out, while at the same time reserving the right to pass judgment), know as soon as they see the building being blown-up on television that Brendan must be a Dennis Hopper or Alan Rickman-like monster and a suitable candidate for whatever level of sheer Hell that might be visited upon him.

‘Horseman, Pass By’, takes the audience into the Quinn household and immediately answers the question,  “ … where did all this come from?”

The first thing you will notice is just how unremarkable it is. The people you will meet are equally unremarkable.

Of course what the Quinn’s were asked to accept as ordinary in the Northern Ireland of those days wasn’t exactly what the other subjects of Her Majesty the Queen were asked to accept as ordinary. They were just expected to act ‘ordinary’. You know, no blowing up buildings and the like and make do with Bruce Willis films like then rest of us.  D.M.