It has been a good week for Gary Mitchell. First he shared the George Devine award for his magnificent play about the RUC, The Force of Change - surely due for a revival at the Royal Court since everyone has heard of it but few have seen it. Then on Tuesday Mitchell's latest play, Marching On, opened at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast, and confirmed his energy and talent.
Seeing Mitchell played on home ground, one realised he has the rare gift of speaking to his own community while reaching out to the world beyond. Marching On could hardly be more topical. As the Belfast bonfires are being built in readiness for the Orange festivities, Mitchell explores the divisions inside the Unionist community through a typically fractious family.
The grandfather, Samuel, is an old-style Orangeman who simply wants to march in peace. His son, Chris, is a surly RUC night-worker coping with an impossible job and his wife's defection. The real problems come from grandson Ricky, an active member of a boys' band who has a knee-jerk hatred of Catholics. Add a Scottish visitor who is idolised by Ricky's randy sister and you have a recipe for trouble.
As in his earlier plays, Mitchell suggests that Northern Ireland's problems are as much generational as sectarian. In Trust he showed a 15-year-old boy used as a personal battleground by his UDA father and his intransigent mother. Here he reverses the situation, showing the unruly Ricky, product of a divided home and culture, as the flame that lights the blue touch-paper. A Catholic residents' group, post-Drumcree, asks for an Orange Order march to be re-routed. Its claim is upheld. Result: chaos on the streets, with Ricky and his mates seeking revenge by torching Catholic homes and burning cars.
In Mitchell's persuasive view, divided families are a metaphor for a divided community. And, as in his previous plays, he suggests that no one has a monopoly on truth. The pious grandad argues for "dignified" marches but signally fails to discipline Ricky and is quick to endorse routine quips like, "Does the Pope wear a dress?" Ricky may be the product of an absentee mother and a moody dad, but he's still a cocky show-off filled with paranoid prejudices. Intriguingly, the audience's sympathies, judging by their applause, go to the beleaguered RUC dad, who laments that he has to carry the can for the community's failures; yet Mitchell also shows that the man is a bit of a brute, who carries his strong-arm tactics into the home.
Mitchell accepts that Orange and Green have their own separate values, but in his complex world there are no simple blacks and whites. It is this ability to convey the contradictions of the Protestant community that make Mitchell a major writer.
These contradictions are apparent on the most mundane level. Whenever I visit Belfast I'm astonished by the warmth and hospitality; yet when I enquired why people were exulting in Portugal's football victory, I was told, "Hardliners love the Crown but hate the English."
As well as conveying Protestant paradox, Mitchell also fulfils one of drama's most basic functions: the anthropological recording of the country's customs. Locals complain his plays are sometimes too explanatory, but until I saw Marching On I never quite realised how much Scottish participants in the Orange Order marches were revered or treated as sex objects. Mitchell writes with real verve and edge. If I have any cavil with his new piece, it lies in its lack of formal adventurousness. In The Force of Change, Mitchell brilliantly used the claustrophobic police thriller to explore the interlocking collusions between the RUC and the loyalist paramilitaries. But here, although inter-generational family strife is the play's whole point, you sometimes wish Mitchell could get out of the living room and onto the streets.
Stuart Graham's production seeks to compensate with some none-too-visible back-projections and by interspersing scenes with the sound of marching bands. But the real strength of the production lies in the rock-solid performances, in particular from Packy Lee as the anarchic Ricky, Sean Caffrey as his ailing grandad and from Simon Wolfe as his father, a peace-keeper full of compacted violence.
It's a vibrantly informative and enjoyable play that clearly connects with its audience. I was struck by the remark of a well-known Unionist politician sitting next to me, who said that the great strength of writers like Gary Mitchell and Marie Jones is that they record Northern Ireland's tribal divisions from the inside but with a critical eye. He was dead right. The key question is whether drama, in acknowledging Northern Ireland's problems, can do anything to further a solution.
• Marching On is at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast (028-9038 1081), till July 1.
