In Bill Morrison’s 1977 play, Flying Blind, the middle-class socialist and sociology lecturer, Michael, posits a solution to the Northern Ireland Troubles, placing responsibility for an end to the conflict firmly on a divided working class: “But, being serious, don’t you think it’s essential that both sides, I mean the working class, must get together here, that any solution must come from them?” This reading of the Troubles (heavily satirised in Morrison’s play) is echoed throughout the theatre of the era, either explicitly in statements like Michael’s, or implicitly in the ideology of the text. But in a body of work dominated by working-class characters and settings, the relationship between a play’s ideological construction of the conflict and the representation of the working class has been largely overlooked. This paper questions the significance of form, audience and authorship in constructing narratives of the working class and the Troubles, and probes theatre’s ability to challenge or reinscribe hegemonic attitudes and stereotypes. 

Ciara McAllister recently completed her PhD at the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research project, “Representation and Resistance: Writing Gender, Ethnonationalism and the Working Class in the Novels and Theatre of the ‘Troubles’” was funded by the Northern Bridge Consortium, under the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Ciara’s research has been awarded the Margaret Cuthbert Fraser Research Prize, the Maureen Murphy Prize and was runner up for the Irish Society of Theatre Research New Scholar’s Prize. Her most recent publication is in the Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace (2023).