●●●○○

Nineteen years ago Bewley’s Café Theatre opened and began putting on the traditional lunchtime plays that it is famed for. For many years (before it closed for renovation in February 2015) Dubliners flocked in at 12:50pm every day to see a hour long play accompanied with an ‘optional light lunch’. Classics such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and Seán O’Casey have all been performed there, as well as some new works by the likes of Caitríona Daly, and Karen Ardiff. However, even when the theatre took up residency in the Powerscourt centre for a short period, the traditional ideas of a bowl of soup and a play during your lunch break still stood. Therefore, I was very surprised to attend a play in Bewley’s at eight o’clock at night. Gone were the bowls of soup- replaced with glasses of wine, and the occasional Irish coffee.

Ireland’s Call (as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival) was performed to a sold out audience. John Connors performs an hour long monologue, under the direction of Jimmy Smallhorne. It’s Connors’ writing debut, as the award winning Love/Hate actor talks us through the story of one Coolock resident as he becomes caught up in the drug scene. During the play, he falls in and out of love and watches as everyone around him dies. It’s a story that keeps hitting you with tragedy after tragedy.

The audience was mainly made up of middle-aged Caucasian people and having a North Dublin man joke at them about drugs for an hour almost certainly cemented one thought in place for them: that almost everyone who comes from a ‘disadvantaged’ area (such as Coolock, Ballymun, or Kilbarrack) uses drugs regularly and freely. The play did little to generate hope that the communities were changing and breaking free of their stereotypes, instead, it gave the story of a worst case scenario. The play also emphasised how run down the areas are and drew strongly on the fact that Ireland is still extremely racist. It also implied that the North Dublin accent is strongly associated with poverty and criminal activity, as throughout the play the South Dublin accent was only used to describe a fundraiser in a rugby club or to show off how rich someone from Bray was.

In my opinion, as a proud North Dubliner who lives on the doorstep of a so-called ‘disadvantaged’ community, there needs to be a shift in the type of plays that are written in these communities. Why not talk about the fact that crime rates in Coolock fell over 50% in 2017 as opposed to 2016, according to The Irish Times? Or the fact that there had been major regrowth and rejuvenation in Ballymun as the demolition of the shopping centre (the last of the buildings from the 1960’s) is to go ahead soon. As the play was receiving a standing ovation, I realised that although Bewley’s had stepped away from the traditional lunchtime performances, they had not stepped away from putting traditional stereotypes on the stage for people to enjoy.