A New Book about Theatre of Witness
Toni Shapiro-Phim in conversation with Teya Sepinuck
Teya Sepinuck
During what is known as the Troubles, conflict raged between those who wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom and those who wanted it to break from the UK and become part of a united Ireland. By the time of the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, the violent struggle had lasted about thirty years. By sheer coincidence, a new book about a remarkable theater and peacebuilding initiative in Northern Ireland has been published just as the world is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which brought most of the fighting to an end.
Teya Sepinuck’s We are the Ripple Effect: Theatre of Witness in Northern Ireland, offers a first-hand account of the development of this particular approach to performance in the midst and aftermath of violent conflict, written by the founder of Theatre of Witness herself. It also presents a window into the lived experiences of the performers who participated, and includes excerpts from actual performance scripts. Teya defines Theatre of Witness (ToW) as “a testimonial form of performance where people whose voices haven’t been heard perform their own stories as a way for audiences to bear witness to issues of suffering and trauma, and transformation and peace. And always embedded in this work is the desire to find the medicine in the stories, both for the performers and the audience. A place where it’s not just a recitation of suffering and what happened, but also about where the turning points are. Where’s the resilience? Where’s the beauty? Where’s the love?” People from opposing sides of the conflict appear on stage, sharing their stories and perspectives in front of audiences that are sometimes mainly from one side or the other, and often mixed.
Kieran Gallagher and Victoria Geelen in We Carried Your Secrets, 2009. Photo courtesy of Teya Sepinuck.
Thirteen years after crafting the first ToW play in Northern Ireland, and nine years after leaving the country to return to her homeland of the United States, Teya was in a workshop, held via Zoom in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a number of the performers from Northern Ireland. Hearing them speak about how they have continued to use the ToW films in international and national peace workshops since Teya left inspired her to work with them to get their words on paper. She wanted to explore how they had grown into true peacebuilders. The idea for this book had been born.
What follows are Teya’s words, excerpted from a conversation we had about the book:
My goal with this book was to give [the performers] something back. Each of them had performed their show a minimum of 14 times. And there were the films of the shows, plus they’ve been doing a million workshops. But there’s something different about having your testimony in a book. This is really for them, and for generations to come. The performers are getting older. They are that peacemaking generation that lived through [the Troubles] and the transition, and so it feels like their stories are even more important now.
I was in Northern Ireland for five years doing ToW work. I had done four productions. Three were particularly about the Troubles and one was about asylum seekers as well as about people in Northern Ireland who had lost their homes due to the Troubles. In all that time, one of the most extraordinary things for me was seeing the friendship develop between Anne and Kathleen. In Northern Ireland, that friendship blows most people’s minds. Kathleen’s husband was killed by the IRA [Irish Republican Army] and Anne was in the IRA, as a quartermaster. And their friendship is so deep and profound; they look after each other. They care for each other like sisters. Kathleen’s husband had been blown up by the IRA and it was one of the most seminal things that happened during the Troubles. He was kidnapped, chained to a van, and driven to an army checkpoint where the IRA blew the van up. He and five soldiers were completely, utterly eviscerated. Robin, who performed in the first year’s ToW piece, was on the body recovery team and spoke [in the play] about finding human remains, including a backside, and a heart, at the scene. We knew Kathleen would come to the show so we wanted to alert her so she would know that Patsy’s death was being alluded to. And then she asked me if she could share her story in the next year’s show.
She was the first person I knew was going to be in the second year’s show and I knew it was going to be about women. I realized then that I was going to try to get an ex-combatant, but it was hard to find women ex-combatants. One of the men who had been in a republican paramilitary recommended Anne. When we began meeting, she spent probably the first four sessions that we met sobbing her guts out. I wasn’t sure she’d be ready at all. But then she was desperate to be part of it, as was Kathleen. So, I told them about each other before we all met as a group so they knew they – you know – they weren’t coming into the group cold. But that first meeting was very, very emotional. I asked the group to introduce themselves by telling a little bit about their story and Kathleen wanted to go first. I knew that if she talked first, Anne would be too overwhelmed to speak, so I actually intervened and said, ‘I’d like Anne to go first,’ and, when she finished telling her story, Kathleen just said, ‘It’s ok. It’s ok.’ They had a lot to work through, obviously, but they just became extraordinarily close.
Because the Historical Inquiries Commission was still going on, and anybody who said they had been part of a paramilitary could still be prosecuted, Anne was really taking her life in her hands by claiming that she had been a quartermaster in the IRA. And Kathleen was incredibly protective of her. She was the most protective of her of anybody, and was terrified at every performance that something bad would happen to Anne. They now do a million workshops all over together. They’re just best of friends.
Anne Walker in I Once Knew a Girl, 2010. Photo courtesy of Teya Sepinuck.
Kathleen had grown to love Anne. There was one performance we were supposed to do at Stormont, the seat of the government, and there was someone in the government at that time who had stated that he believed that people needed to be prosecuted for the past involvement. So, we cancelled that performance. We didn’t go there because we knew it was too dangerous for Anne. You know, there were overt dangers like that but there were always covert dangers. And they all knew that. They weren’t out hunting down people at that time, but there was the chance it could happen.
The one in most danger was Robin because at the time he worked with us on the first year’s show, he was still a serving police officer and there were very active death threats on serving police officers. When we first started meeting, he thought it would be safe for him to perform on one side of the city, and then he went, ‘No, I can’t perform anywhere, anywhere that someone knows that I’m in the show. There could be an assassination at the show. And anybody could be hurt.’ So, we put his part on film. But he came incognito to every show. He was so devoted.
Everyone had lost so many loved ones. They’d lived through a war. So, the performers wanted to do anything to change things.
Performers in We Carried Your Secrets, 2009. Photo courtesy of Teya Sepinuck.
Because people always wanted to be with the performers [after a show], we would have a reception. The performers would come off stage for a while and get themselves together, and hug, and then go out and mingle. That way they didn’t have to [be with the audience members] if they weren’t up for it. And people would go up to them and often tell them their own stories. And just thank them and cry. We also had the audience members write reflections – we gave them each reflection sheets – and so many people responded. Before we would meet for each performance, we would read the reflections from the time before and they were always so inspiring and moving.
I have to say, in the four [productions] we did – it was probably 70 or 80 performances that we did altogether – not one performer ever missed a show. And there are no understudies in this, you know, because people are playing themselves. It was by the grace of God that people stayed healthy enough to do everything.
One of the things I did in Northern Ireland [to mark the launch of the book] was a live reading of some excerpts. I can’t tell you how powerful that was for me, and it seems like also for the audience. I realize that these were originally spoken words, and now [they are in] a book and readers are hearing their own voices in their heads when they read, and I’m still hearing the voices of the people whose stories they are. But there’s something about bringing it back to life that is particularly meaningful to me. It is harkening back to the oral tradition of reading. Not storytelling, but reading. I really love doing that.