The decision to play The Sash as a period drama, despite it recounting a relatively
recent period of history, isn’t necessarily a confession that the script has
lost its relevance. In the period after the Good Friday Agreement, the vivid
descriptions of terrorist attacks and the sporadic racist references are more
likely to connect to the current War on Terror and Islamophobia than the battle
for a united Ireland, yet the core prejudices on display – sectarianism from
protestant and Roman Catholic - are still, sadly, part of Glaswegian life.
Most strikingly, the obnoxious behaviour
comes from both sides of the divide. The aging Orangeman is given the most
melodramatic, and comic, bigotry, but his Catholic neighbour gets in a fair few
digs. Even today, there is something outrageous about hearing this kind of
language on stage and the message – that the conflict in Ireland was originally
not about religion but freedom – is supported by both sides insistence on a
loyalty to a parents’ values.
Perhaps the differences between 1973, when
the play was written and set, and 2013 are in the aspirations of the younger
characters. There is a rejection of older values, with a protestant son wanting
to discuss the historical truth behind the myth of Good King Billy and the
pregnant Catholic daughter rejecting the certainties of her faith’s moral
teachings for a socialist alternative. And the rare reference to the Soviet
ideal of Russia is jarring. The aftermath of the USSR might not have revealed
the propaganda of the USA as accurate, but it undermined that nation as a
shining example of universal brotherhood.
Yet the conflict between the generations,
and the final failure to find an honorable solution, lends The Sash its relevance. Its vision of the Orange Order as a fading
presence might have been premature, but the arguments between son and father
have an almost archetypal ferocity. Snippets of information about William of
Orange’s allegiances and conduct contextualise his hagiography by the Order
into a brutal history, and the details of bombing in Ireland locate the action
in a period when paramilitary activity was intense: yet the intergenerational
throw downs could come from any year in the past fifty.
Because the conflicts described in The Sash `are still present in Glasgow,
it doesn’t quite slip into a complete period drama: the issues are more
immediate than those in the political plays from south of the border written in
the same period. It carefully charts the way that political upheaval impacts on
personal life. A relationship collapses, a father tumbles out of a window, a
Catholic aunt berates her niece for being pregnant outside of wedlock and the
vitality of Irish Republicanism and Orange Pride are gradually ossified.
The question of whether The Sash would make much sense outside
of Scotland is pertinent: when intellectuals talk about Scottish identity, they
conveniently ignore the sectarian divide even though it is one of the most
distinctive qualities that distinguish English and Scottish cultures. There are
enclaves in England, such as Manchester, that have a similar relationship to
the past. However, the mutual loathing of Billy and Tim is rarely so noticeable
in the south.
Rapture are being difficult by restaging
this classic. It would be far easier to put The
Sash in the same category as The
Bigot and The Pavilion pantomime, relics of a by-gone age. Unfortunately,
the numbers in the audience attest to its popularity, and the nihilistic vision
of culture – nobody wins the argument, and only the final song, which insists
that once men were “neither orange men nor green” is a tattered flag of hope –
is a bracing counterblast to the optimistic predictions of the contemporary
politician. Respecting the way that the play itself is awkward, being neither
clearly political nor personal, historical nor contemporary, this production,
Michael Emans lets the story tell itself, not even flinching at the unappetising
attitudes it displays towards religion, women and the idealism of the young.
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