WHEN director Paula McFetridge and actor husband, Vincent Higgins, first set out on their Green and Blue journey six years ago, they could never have predicted the colourful reactions from audiences "in the maddest of places" to Laurence McKeown's thought-provoking, heart-rending play about humanity divided by a border.
Brexit wasn't even on the table and 'borders' were something of a throwback to the past - still there but unpatrolled, still confined to land and not yet envisaged as an invisible line surfing somewhere through a choppy Irish sea.
Now, as the award-winning Green and Blue - following a developing friendship between an RUC officer and a Garda officer on the Fermanagh/Monaghan border at the height of the Troubles - sets off for Prague, it has never seemed more relevant.
"The whole narrative around the legacy of conflict, the legacy of change, the concept of borders, is international – it's a universal language and we have really found that with the show," says McFetridge, who directs Higgins and fellow Northern Ireland actor James Doran in the play produced by Kabosh Theatre.
"No matter where we have gone with it over the years – and we have been in the maddest of places, including a ruined castle off the coast of Cork when audiences and cast had to be transported by boat – we have been struck by the strong, emotional reactions from audiences who have connected with it everywhere, from Paris, Dresden and Brussels, to Cork, Edinburgh and a GAA club in Newry.
"We are really excited to be invited to Prague for the annual Fringe Festival in October - especially because we thought it would never happen after being postponed five times due to the pandemic."
Green and Blue will be one of the star attractions at the Prague festival and will be staged at the Divadlo Inspirace Theatre in Liechtenstein Palace in the heart of the Czech capital.
Before that, the play – which picked up the Lustrum Award for Best Theatrical Moment at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 – will next week have its first run at the Lyric where, incidentally, McFetridge and Higgins first met while playing girlfriend and boyfriend in a theatre production in 1994.
It will then move to several other theatres - the Strule in Omagh (September 19), Ardhowen in Enniskillen (September 20), Market Place Theatre, Armagh (September 21) and the Old Church Centre, Cushendun (September 22) - before opening in Prague on September 27.
Unsurprisingly, given her long association directing McKeown's "modern classic", the power of the storytelling has had an impact on McFetridge too, who says each scene is redolent of the overall tragedy of Irish history "and its wasted lives".
Set in 1994 just before the IRA ceasefire, RUC officer, David McCabe (Higgins) and his counterpart in the Republic, Garda officer Eddie O'Halloran (Doran), recount their experiences to each other, recognising a mutual dependence and a brooding sense of what happens on one side of the border affects the other.
"These two ordinary men represent us all and our place in a divided land," suggests McFetridge.
"It allows us to glimpse the human beings behind the uniform and eloquently explores the human cost of man-made borders.
"Often the Garda who were patrolling the border areas, particularly around the Cavan/Monaghan border, were from Cork and were as isolated and as far from home as the RUC men would have been from the north, so that idea of isolation became the thing that links the two characters.
"They communicate regularly by radio, they sing to each other, they talk about how they miss their families and what it's like to feel isolated from the community they are part of...
"It's about how people judge you and how you judge yourself and this whole perception of 'other'. It's real, it's human and it's laced with humour, insight and lots of touching moments - especially after something happens that makes the pair decide to meet up in person."
It is certainly 'real', having been inspired by Diversity Challenges' 'Voices from the Vault' oral histories taken from former RUC and An Garda Siochana officers who spent time recalling their experiences during the conflict.
"We spent about two years working with Laurence [McKeown] on the script and doing readings of it for a committee of ex-Garda Siochana and ex-RUC officers and committee members of Diversity Challenges which had gathered the archive," recounts McFetridge.
"We did different readings of the play for them and they gave us advice and talked to us about it was like to patrol the border at that time.
"They talked about their uniforms, how they communicated by radio – how an RUC guy in, say Fermanagh, might be on the radio to a Guard in Monaghan every single day but they never would meet. In post-show discussions, people would ask why the Garda character only has a torch and bicycle and the RUC man is suited and booted with guns and everything, but that was actually the way it was."
It is "one of those plays", she believes, that leaves no-one "unmoved" and that crosses international as well as local borders.
"The response has been incredible," she says. "One woman, after a performance in Newry, told us she had two grandfathers, one a Garda officer and the other an RUC officer, and the play made her appreciate more deeply the difficulties faced by both.
"After a performance in Armagh, a guy came up to me and said one side of his family was completely estranged from the other because of the same thing. And in Cork, an ex-RUC man told how, after he had done his stint on the border, he had moved as far away from it as he could and had never talked about it to his family - but after seeing the show, he felt he now could start a long overdue conversation."
Further afield, audiences have been similarly impacted. In Dresden, an older woman, through a translator, talked about the fall of the Berlin wall and her community's relationship with police, while in Paris young people told how friends in the Parisienne police force often felt ostracised because of their uniform.
"The play continues to be relevant at a time when borders in Ireland, Britain, Europe and further afield are such a hotly debated issue," says the director, who uses a scoring system with audiences to help evaluate attitudinal change regarding issues such as 'more/less willing to communicate with a police officer' or 'increased/decreased empathy towards those patrolling the border'.
"In order for us to be a healthy and informed society, you need to provoke new conversations and I think if we don't have the difficult conversations, then it's very difficult not to pass the bitterness on to the next generation," she says.
"There is real humanity in this play – and humour, as demonstrated in the intercut car search scene on opposite sides of the border – but it is the humanity that makes it work and it is because of the humanity that there are still audiences today who want to see it, who weren't ready to see it when we first started in 2016."
:: Green and Blue will be showing at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, from September 14-18 before moving to other theatres around Northern Ireland. Details at kabosh.net/production/green-blue-2022
CAPTIONS - from left: Paula McFetridge and Vincent Higgins enjoying some downtime at the Seamus Heaney 'Listen Now Again' exhibition in Dublin
Paula McFetridge, artistic director Kabosh Theatre
Actors James Doran (left) as Garda officer, Eddie O'Halloran, and Vincent Higgins as RUC officer, David McCabe, in Green and Blue presented by Kabosh Theatre. Photo: Neil Harrison
