ON THE ROAD TO DROGHEDA

...Curiously, I had heard no one before them even suggest such a war was in progress...

...If the Wilkinson Steel razor blade people were depending on purchases by these beardless, menacing boys for their Johnny Walker Red, they'd develop a terrible thirst...

...Tell him that you have written a pageant in honor of your Cousin Maude's eighty-fifth birthday and he will have to leave town on business...

...While traveling from Dublin to Belfast, our train was halted because of bombs ahead on the track...

...Speaking quickly in a dialect which I barely understood, he announced that he had just been elected chairman of a youth division of the Peace People...

...bishop, addressed us over a meat and potato lunch that the world "justice" was spoken in the same breath with "peace" by any ranking ecclesiastic...

...It was their hope that as many as fifty thousand people from both sides of the border and the Gospel would begin to grope toward a union of their great divide in the very territory where three centuries earlier King William of Orange's victory over his royal but Catholic counterpart had assured religious tensions among the Irish people...

...We talked for a long while about the condition of the have-nots in Ulster...

...I was on my way to spend the night with an unknown Belfast family...

...The morning of the Drogheda rally, for example, sixteen shops in Derry were fire-bombed and a hundred people added to the ranks of the unemployed...

...The British military were everywhere crawling about in their Saracen tanks and personnel carriers and warily occupying heavily protected check points...

...That is the only way to explain the success of Tom Stoppard's Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land, the celebratory farce now playing at the John Golden...

...The moral, I fear, is that peace and justice in Ulster will not kiss through rallies alone...

...I was traveling with a hundred fellow Americans in Ireland and Ulster on what was billed as a "journey of reconciliation...

...Brought around slowly by room temperature Martini & Rossi vermouth, I brought myself to ask whether I was standing in the middle of a mini-war between Protestants and Catholics or an economic war along classic lines between haves and have-nots...

...Gently I put the same question to one of his colleagues, but his answer did little to quiet my anxiety...

...The Peace People's leaders were anxious to have an American contingent as part of their Sunday, Dec...

...Peering out through the steamed-up windows, I mused that a political Bultmann could have a field day demythologizing the cute line that has it: "While the songs of the Irish may be sad, their wars are merry...

...These were the words urgently whispered to me as my tired body was lifted into an already filled Ford Escort...

...The conversation of husband and wife struck me as informed...

...There is a great deal of rather tiresome business in which lace panties, on and off the secretary, are displayed to the appreciative audience...

...Result: the trench,coats are shook out, the Smith & Wessons oiled, the fighting begins...

...Sponsoring the nine-day trip were the National Council of Churches and Pax Christi USA...

...Their mammoth assembly alongside the cold, brown waters of the River Boyne, running through Drogheda, would surely say to even the die-hards: "Whoever and whatever you are--seven years of guerrilla warfare and seventeen hundred dead are quite enough...

...The bloody events of these recent Irish years seemed to testify that reconciliation and peace would continue to be greasy eels as long as the injustices and indignities that opened this fresh chapter in the long-running troubles were not-seriously addressed and at least partially resolved...

...18 March 1977:180...

...Happily, at least for me, the hours proved to be precisely what the doctor might have ordered for terminal word-fatigue...

...yet an occasional piece by Neil Simon or Stephen Sondheim, properly dressed, set and performed, would send him running to the theater...

...The artwork in their warm and comfortable home spoke of these travels...

...Privately I asked one of the Protestant defies about his eloquent silence on the subject of justice in a context of peace and reconciliation...

...It was the fifth day since my arrival at Dublin Airport "for the last peace rally of 1976" in Drogheda...

...One o[ them, which may be said to have thematic relevance to the play as a whole, is a reminiscence by an aged~civil servant of how he once won a bet from Lloyd George, an anecdote which, although he does not know it, recounts an occasion on which Lloyd George knew his mother (how did Stoppard pass up a joke as obvious as that...

...It was presumably the publie side of Stoppard's play, the farce about sex scandal in high places, that made it attractive to the Kennedy Center, which brought it to Washington in time to ride the wake of the Elizabeth Ray confessions...

...So, whenever the Catholic have-nots make unpleasant noises about Such expensive goals as election reforms, decent housing and better jobs as, say, in Derry in 1969, the haves tell the Protestant have-nots about the unruly Papists now threatening the little they have...

...It's a fight between the have-nots on both sides...

...Until that happy, long-distanced day, the roles of my host family and their Peace People friends, both Catholic and Protestant, who are already sharing what they have, will become Commonweal: 179 increasingly more important...

...One blue-haired matron, wearing the heavy gloves of her husband who stayed home before the telly, may have said it all: "My neighbors in Dublin, you see, do not feel it's their problem...

...Their open ~ identification with the much publicized Peace People in a city anxious to self-destruct involved risk which they made light of...

...enough opening and closing doors to suggest that Stoppard has sat at the feet of the authors of Move Over, Mrs...

...Ironically enough, they can anticipate aid from other haves who will grudgingly make concessions, political and otherwise, simply because they have grown weary of ducking bombsplinters and submitting to body searches on their way to the bank...

...When Dirty Linen & New-Found-Land was performed at InterAction's Almost Free Theatre, the oblique references to Berman's enterprises--the publishing house, the city farm, the Fun Art Bus---must have delighted the audience of friends and well-wishers...

...About 1 AM, a car pulled up Outside the house...

...All right, Padre, let's move it...

...His roots are among the Belfast have-nots...

...My young h0sts along with their children had lived several years in India, Nigeria and the States, working for OXFAM...

...Prominent Protestant churchmen did not allow the media to outdo them in recognizing our presence, however...

...The trip was in response to the invitation of the Peace People of Ulster...

...Nothwithstanding our modest numbers, the Irish dailies along with the television people paid us a flattering amount of attention...

...Given their seventy percent plurality in Ulster, they are largely Protestant...

...history, even a small band of Americans traveling an ocean on a reconciliation journey was indeed a news item...

...On to Broadway, then, and a small play written for a small theater had puffed up like a pouter pigeon and come to roost in a Broadway house as though it were a major Stoppard effort, like Jumpers or Travesties...

...A boy of about eighteen years burst into the room...

...This tone was upsetting to several in our company...

...Jefferson advised us, "Justice cannot sleep forever...

...Several hours later we were hurried out of a restaurant by the military after a bomb threat...

...Stoppard has already written several plays, of which A]ter Magritte is best known here, for Inter-Action Trust, the communal group which Ed Berman helped form to investigate the social uses of theater...

...Their strong presence in both Dublin and Belfast moved the 25 Roman Catholic members of ~ur group to stammer, first, in embarrassment and, finally, in anger at the absence of their R.C...

...Markham and No Sex Please-We're British...

...seen only through its popular songs, movies, novels, an oddly affectionate nod to Berman's fictional country of origin...

...The dispiriting weather did much to add to the cemetery-flavor of the ruins...

...The FATHER JAMES GILHOOLEY is Regional Coordinator of Pax C h r i s t i , the International Catholic Movement for Peace...

...The haves of his reply are the upper and middle classes...

...Increasing numbers of the haves will learn the advantages of banking by mail...

...While many in our party were professional peace types, few were authorities on things Irish...

...18 March 1977:178 The days before the rally were spent in Christmasbuntinged Dublin, gray Belfast and the deathly quiet streets of Derry...

...choreography is time-tested and comes with a moneyback guarantee...

...None pretended to be...

...Hurriedly swallowing the last of my Irish cheddar, I too looked terribly composed...

...Putting down his ale, my host answered quickly: 'Neither...

...Somewhat nervously, I recalled that one of the more popular pastimes in Belfast was assassinations delivered to one's front parlor...

...More high school dropouts will be airlifted from England to secure temporary employment with the Royal Rifles or whatever, guarding people as deprived as themselves in the Shankill and the Bogside...

...He is Protestant...

...The haves stand above it and laugh all the way to the bank...

...I finished the day by crawling into bed in a hotel whose dining room had disappeared in a bomb explosion a short time before...

...The destruction caused by explosives was obvious...

...Like a Greek drama searching for a happy ending on Irish soil, their green grass-roots movement was born from the violent death of three young children from the same family on a residential Belfast street in August 1976...

...The violence, in turn, will increase their own numbers...

...whom she converts in the interval...

...Eventually, as odious as it might sound to Irish romantics at home and abroad, the politician in Chesterfield and homburg, with his car-coated economist in tow, will have to put together a package attractive to all sides...

...And the "damnable question" will remain just that...

...much verbal knockabout in which sexual innuendo is used to malaprop up government jargon...

...bishops still make their homes among the Irish people...

...In any event, the Irish Times estimated that fifteen thousand appeared at the rally...

...The divines before him were more anxious to tell us that a war between the churches was not in progress and that reconciliation and peace were absolutely imperative...

...Not until we reached Derry was conclusive proof given that R.C...

...The interval I mentioned above is not an intermission, but an interlude, New-Found-Land...

...Their lifestyle was certainly middle class...

...If my hosts were upset, they said nothing...

...But the great crowds anticipated stayed home...

...Our party was given reason aplenty to understand better the tensions of life in Northern Ireland...

...Shortly thereafter, additional have-nots wearing Her Majesty's jaunty red berets and camouflage combat suits are flown in by the RAF to keep the peace...

...for instance, one extended scene depends for its laughs on the differences among 1he London daily papers...

...When, on our last evening in Ireland, the soft-spoken Cardinal Conway told us over tea and biscuits that in the present peace movement he and his peers are not the leaders but the led, the applause that followed seemed prompted more by relief than mischief...

...In the interim, the have-nots will continue to beat each other up...

...Dirty Linen presents a Parliamentary committee meeting ostensibly investigating a monumental scandal in which more than a hundred members of Parliament are assumed to have indulged in hanky-panky with a mysterious titian-haired beauty...

...In it, two Home Office officials consider whether or not Berman (who is never named in the play) should be granted English citizenship, but the chief business of the sketch is to give each of the actors a long monologue...

...One irreverent wag concluded: "It's comforting to know that the Irish R.C.s have learned the popular American game of ecumenics at long distance...

...When Ed Berman, the American-born director, playwright and adventurer in urban social experiments, became an English citizen last year, Tom Stoppard wrote a play (or two plays, depending on whether or not one italicizes the ampersand) in honor of the occasion...

...counterparts...

...It is amusingly performed and, as one would expect from Stoppard, it is often funny, but it is about as insubstantial as an occasional piece can be...

...Promising to be concise, he answered by query in what seemed to be several thousand fluid but nervous words...

...Recognizing a style that I have been known to use, I quietly withdrew...

...The other set piece is a lyric travelogue which carries speaker and audience across a U.S...

...We were~n't exactly looking forward to a long evening with still one more sentimental, teary-eyed Irish-American...

...5 rally in Drogheda, a ~ausy town about thirty miles above Dublin...

...The same afternoon, just before our tour of the same area, five British soldiers "on their last day in Ulster," as next day's newspapers wrote, were fired upon by a Russian-made rocket...

...MESSAGE, FARCE & HOME MOVIE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE STAGE The sophisticated New Yorker, that rare and wondrous beast, would not be caught dead watching a friend's home movies, but hang the name Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut on the footage and he would be in line immediately waiting to pay inflated prices for a chance to share an essentially private experience...

...Perhaps, given recent U.S...

...Since the pretentious use of foreign phrases and the idiotic naming of restaurants is as American as it is British, some of the verbal games, however attenuated, are easily assimilated...

...The young man was introduced as this Catholic couple's foster son...

...And on their second point there was, to my peasant Irish ear, a "peace at any price" tone or, as a Belfast priest would put it weeks later, a "peace without change" inflection...

...However, my reluctance to hear any further long and usually conflicting sentences on the troubles was just as real as that of my hosts...

...Even if New York playgoers read the article by the editor-in-chief of Playbill and pick up the proper clues, the jokes are secondhand, the sense of occasion lost as it would be if you had to explain the reference to the missing sachet in your Cousin Maude pageant...

...Sitting like exotic plants under glass, we were bused through the ShankiU and Falls Road of Belfast as well as Derry's Bogside and Waterside...

...The obvious joke is that the incompetent secretary is the woman in question and thatmas the English would say she has had it off with all the committee members, male and female, except for one priggish M.P...

...The trip finally brought us to Drogheda on a cold, but mercifully dry, day...

...Much of the incidental humor is relentlessly local, as alien to an American audience as the details of Ed Berman's life...

...Unwilling to be outdone in the courage department, I resolved that if I were to be rudely dispatched to God, I would go with a touch of class...

...But, more to my interest, it was not until Edward Daly, Derry's impressive R.C...

...A good percentage of the young men with their dark, high-powered rifles almost dwarfing their bodies looked as though they had been playing soldiers on grimy English tenement streets not too many winters before...

...But, as our own Mr...