A PERFORMANCE of East Belfast Boy was an extraordinary experience for me and not just because of the play.
This Irish-speaking, GAA-loving, RTE watching, diddlydee supporting nationalist from off Belfast's Falls Road found himself surrounded by a sea of Union Jacks, Ulster banners, Orange flags and loyalist paramilitary murals as he made his way to the Ballymac Friendship Centre in Frazer Pass.
Even my sat nav asked “Are you sure about this?” It was truly foreboding.
The sky was horror film monochrome, bilious black rainbearing clouds passed overhead, the atmosphere heavy with heat and illportent.
To be honest, I thought about doing a U-turn and heading back home when I saw a crowd of young people mingle outside the venue but it was too late.
I parked and sat in my car pretending to be texting. But do you know what? I am lucky in that I have a voice in my head which said: “Don’t be an eejit.
"This area is like the one you grew up in ok, without the flags, but working-class, poor, forgotten or ignored, inhabited mostly by decent, struggling people but like everywhere else with its thugs and druggies and politicos and its humour and history. You should feel at home here,” it encouraged. That was the voice that prevailed.
So in I went, bought a cup of coffee with a couple of shortbread biscuits and donated a fiver to help develop the building where the play was taking place.
It is fair to say that the Ballymac Friendship Centre is no Taj Mahal but when the lights went down, the buzz of Delta9 Techno party DJ James Kirkpatrick kicked in and actor Anthony Boyle (from Poleglass) became an East Belfast Boy.
It was a moving, strong, powerful performance that had pathos, vulnerability, energy, humour and menace wrapped up in the one character.
It made me wonder which of these qualities are inherent in people and which are ones we project onto “others” who are different from us.
What preprogammed notions did I project onto the young people outside the centre, for example?
East Belfast Boy wasn’t a facile “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry” play going for easy laughs and dollops of sentiment, we’ve enough of those, thank you.
It was a cliché-free zone, a monologue partly written in verse (rap?) which gets its authenticity from the fact that young men from the Beersbridge Road Residents Association worked with Partisan and writer Fintan Brady in developing the 30-minute show.
I talked briefly to Fintan and Anthony and production manager Karen McFarlane along with Gilly Campbell from the Arts Council afterwards.
They told me that such is the sense of community ownership of the play, that someone sleeps in the centre overnight to make sure nothing goes bump in the night.
I got back to my car and forgot that I hadn’t picked up a progamme so I went back in and picked one up and said goodbye to everyone again.
It was as if I’d left my car keys in the house and went back in for them. It felt like being at home.
That’s how transformational East Belfast Boy was for me.
Footnote: It was hard not to notice the Ballymac was in a bad state of disrepair with tiles missing from the ceiling but the good news is that Social Development Minister Mervyn Storey has announced an investment of £202,000 to refurbish the building and this was a bit of a swansong for the Ugly Duckling.
