The Trouble with Trouble: Restaging Historic Acts of Violence

In the period since the Good Friday agreement (1998), works that depict real atrocities and tragedies have proliferated. Hackett and Rolston, referencing a study by victims organisation Healing Through Remembering, note that storytelling has a particular prevalence in post-conflict northern Ireland and has been widely touted as a viable means of recovering truth and securing justice for victims (2009: 357). This chapter seeks to examine the value, and values, present in productions that depict or describe conflict-era violence, and critically examine the politics, ethics, and dramaturgies at play in applied theatre that uses real historical incidents as the basis for dramatic productions that claim to address legacy issues of the conflict. For the purpose of doing so, it will focus on the play 'Trouble', written by Shannon Yee and produced by Belfast company TheatreofplucK in 2015.