Voyage not to be missed

Pater Balance and Donna Augustin in Voyage of No Return

Theatre Review

Voyage of No Return

Written by Brian Campbell

Directed by Pam Brighton

Amharclann na Carraige

BIFHE, Whiterock Road, Belfast

'Voyage of No Return', the latest work from writer Brian Campbell and the Dubbeljoint theatre company, raises the issue of racism today. More specifically, it asks why it is that those who have suffered racial (sectarian) persecution down through the ages go on to perpetrate it themselves.

The play is set on the volcanic island of Montserrat and examines the lives of two Irishmen, 200 years apart, encompassing slavery, rebellion and modern racist attitudes.

The programme notes quote escaped slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who witnessed the Catholic Irish immigrants, fleeing the Famine, turn against black fellow workers in New York and Detroit.

He wrote: "Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against colour to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens, and yet no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have this same Irish people."

The play goes to the very heart of racism/sectarianism - the racists' mind-bending, blind failure to recognise others as human - but instead as simply extensions of their own appetites and desires, as 'proof' of their own superiority and domination. Racism is about power, domination, rape, violence, denial of the other's humanity.

The play is brilliant. It is the Brian Campbell who, with Lawrence McKeown, examined the 1981 hunger strike in the movie H3, and who has written so many plays, including Des, a play about the life of Des Wilson, the people's priest who last week spoke so powerfully at the funeral of Joe Cahill.

This is the Belfast festival, which brings the strands of today's struggle together, laughs at them, enjoys them and looks at them. Pam Brighton, the director of the play, said this is Brian Campbell's best.

Whether or not it is his best, it is outstanding. It is still on today, Friday, and Saturday. It is not to be missed.

BY ROISIN DE ROSA