Stewart Parker - High Pop

This month sees the release of Hopdance from Ireland's Lilliput Press - the Ulster playwright Stewart Parker's autobiographical novel that he had worked upon in the Seventies and Eighties but was uncompleted at the time of his death from cancer in 1988. It centers on his experiences of having a leg amputated from the same disease while at Queen's University in Belfast.

The book is edited by Marylinn Richtarik whose long comprehensive overview of the artist's life I have just finished reading this evening. Alike Johnny Rogan's biography of Van Morrison the work is grounded on genuinely fascinating narratives of Irish social history alongside the profound changes affecting the commercial constructs of stage performance, broadcast media and cinema production during his lifetime.

I was very lucky to have caught Parker's final play Pentecost at the Lyric Theatre in London's Hammersmith in 1989 - it remains for me the finest piece of drama I have seen on stage in my life. The eleventh hour political detente witnessed in Ulster following the death of Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness certainly resonates with the religous undertones of the play's melancholy denouement. Set during the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike - yet the most successful industrial stoppage of the European working class since the Second World War - it in turn reflected the desperate zero-sum game political turmoil in Northern Ireland in the wake of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement.

Parker is remembered in the main for his stage plays Spokesong and Catchpenny Twist, the BBC Play for Today productions of Iris in the Traffic Ruby in the Rain and The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner, the award-winning ITV Playhouse feature I'm A Dreamer Montreal, London Weekend Television's Blue Money with Tim Curry, the Channel 4 series Lost Belongings and his extraordinary Northern Star telling of the 1798 United Irishmen rebellion leader Henry Joy McCracken's life and execution. Further to his work being so heavily grounded in Irish history - and the perennial cultural fractures that impinged so strongly on community and personal relationships - Richtarik's biography also noted further projects that never saw dramatic fruition including works on the 19th Century Land League campaign and the internment of Allied and Axis servicemen in Eire during the 1939-45 Emergency.

Ironically the civil disorder of the Northern Ireland conflict would remain much in the background of the two best-remembered Play for Today works set there - Parker's Iris In The Traffic, Ruby In the Rain in 1981 and Too Late To Talk To Billy by Graham Reid in 1982.

The former drama is set on one winter's day in Belfast and followed the parallel lifepaths of the two eponymous women. Belfast punk group Stiff Little Fingers provided the soundtrack with singer Jake Burns in a supporting dramatic role himself. In 1977 Parker's first contribution to Play For Today was a version of  The Catchpenny Twist which covered the songwriting career of two ex-teachers against the political vagaries of Seventies Ireland. The magnificently titled  The Kamikaze Groundstaff Reunion Dinner was shown in 1981 in the series and had white British actors playing Japanese war veterans.

Graham Reid's play regarded the familial travails of a young working class Protestant in South Belfast portrayed by Kenneth Branagh and with three further plays to follow as based around the character of Billy Martin. Branagh also starred in Reid's Easter 1916 contribution to the Play For Tomorrow mini-series of 1982 which looked at tensions at a Northern Ireland teacher training college on the centenary of the Dublin rising.

Seven other productions over the course of Play For Today's run touched upon the Ulster conflict.
Dominic Behan's 1972 Carson Country - starring Harry Towb and Sam Kydd - looked at Protestant working class life around the period of the Home Rule crisis and the creation of the Northern Ireland state. It was transmitted in October of that year instead of the planned May in order as not to provoke trouble during the marching season. The following month Behan's The Folk Singer for Armchair Theatre on ITV - about the visit of a Liverpool musician to Belfast - was given a later scheduled transmission slot on the instructions of the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Three months later in turn ATV chairman Sir Lew Grade banned entirely the transmission of Kenneth Griffith's Hang Up Your Brightest Colours:The Life and Death of Michael Collins and this would not be shown at all until 1993.

Over the remainder of the Seventies Taking Leave (1974) was the story of a British soldier who returned to Ulster after six years of service and considered his parents' wish for him to terminate his service; Colin Welland's Yer Man From Six Counties (1976) focused upon a young boy's move to the West of Ireland after the death of his father in an IRA bomb; The Legion Hall Bombing (1976) looked at the Diplock court system then operational in Northern Ireland and whose transmission was also delayed by further BBC concern over editorial content while The Last Window Cleaner (1979) followed the transfer of a policeman to Ulster and his experiences in wartorn Belfast at The Crumlin View boarding house.

During the Eighties Jennifer Johnston's Shadows On Our Skin (1980) viewed the Troubles through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy in Derry's Bogside - and with Horslip's Time To Kill used in the soundtrack - while Fire At Magilligan (1984) followed upon the consequences of a driver picking up a hitchhiker on the motorway out of Belfast and the two gradually realised they were not unknown to each other after all.

Returning to Parker again and a massive personal recommendation for his High Pop rock and folk album reviews for the Irish Times which were compiled some time ago by Belfast's Lagan Press. This is an utterly exceptional collection of vintage music journalism - Parker's reviews being tight, funny, enthusiastic and highly informed. It includes many albums recorded by Parker's personal favorites which clearly included Steely Dan, The Band and Joni Mitchell but the critiques cover a huge amount of artists and styles in the 1970-76  period from The Incredible String Band to Dr Feelgood. His reviews of Lennon's Some Time in New York City and Dylan's Self-Portrait in particular are utterly unreserved. This is an incredibly warm, interesting and witty book in itself and merits many a return reference - do find a space for this on your bookshelf if you are a music fan of the period.

Parker grew up in Sydenham in Protestant East Belfast across the dual carriageway and railway line from the modern day George Best Airport. His funeral took place there too though he had lived the latter part of his life in South West London and previously in Edinburgh. Parker's ashes were to be scattered from the Larne-Stranraer ferry in the middle of the Irish Sea - an irreverent yet deeply symbolic farewell to the restless natives of Britain and Ireland from a true radical and a man of profound intelligence and heart.