Border Crossings at 30

The Times: 30th January 1995

The front page of The Times for 30th January 1995 seems strangely familiar, with its headlines about Tory splits over the EU, tensions in Peru and concerns about climate. But the truth is, the world was actually very different then: on the day when Border Crossings was officially registered at Companies House. Charitable Registration followed in August of the same year, so by any reckoning 2025 marks 30 years of this organisation, and we're wanting to mark that anniversary through a number of initiatives that will reveal themselves across the year. On our birthday, let's begin by kicking off the series of 30 social media posts, #BorderCrossings30, each of which will look back at a significant moment in the company's story.

Choosing those 30 highlights has actually been very challenging. It's partly because there are so many great moments we want to remember, but it's also because not everything is as clear and simple as anniversary projects can make them seem. Border Crossings did not emerge fully formed into the world in 1995. It took several years before the company's intercultural identity was properly established - despite the name - and, as will become apparent over the year, just what that intercultural identity really means has kept evolving and shifting in response to cultural and political changes. The first few projects that the company mounted were responses to invitations and commissions, particularly from the British Council (now, shockingly, in serious danger of collapse). Nevertheless, it's possible to discern in some of these early performances the first shapings of what Border Crossings would become. I think that's especially true of FAITH HEALER, which toured to Brazil, Egypt, France and Hungary, and which I've chosen as the first of our 30 posts for 30 years.

Watching Rachel O’Riordan’s very moving production of Brian Friel's play at the Lyric Hammersmith last year, I was reminded just what a complex and compelling text it is, as well as sensing just how many seeds were planted for us in working with it. This is all the more striking, given that the director wasn't myself, but Richard Allen Cave, who worked very closely with me to establish the company. Richard was Professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at Royal Holloway, and that in itself suggests some important aspects of Border Crossings. We're not scared or dismissive of academia: actually, we embrace it and like our performance work to operate in dialogue with a wider discourse. Royal Holloway has been a crucial partner on many occasions, particularly through Helen Gilbert's collaboration around work with Indigenous artists. Helen's new research project, CoastARTS, will again involve us in an exchange between research and creativity. 

CoastARTS includes Irish partners, and of course FAITH HEALER is an Irish play. The Irish dimension of Border Crossings was there from the very beginning, even though the Irish company was only formally established in 2019. My own (rather brief) formal theatre training was at Trinity Dublin in the later 1980s, and that time spent in Ireland also shifted my perceptions around colonialism, resistance, and the relationship between theatre and politics. I vividly remember sitting in a Dublin bar with an actor from the Abbey Theatre and a young American studying at TCD, when a man came round the tables collecting money for the IRA's campaign in the North. The American was surprised when the actor strongly refused to donate, and even more surprised when he learned that Dublin was actually the capital of an independent republic within a divided island. The 1995 Times front page features a story about the planned release of IRA prisoners in the Republic, "as a reward for the ceasefire". It would be another three years until the Good Friday Agreement, and of course that was far from the end of the story. 

Insofar as we talk of peace and reconciliation in Ireland, theatre, culture and Brian Friel have all played very significant roles. It was shortly after writing FAITH HEALER that Friel joined forces with the great actor Stephen Rea to set up the Field Day company, and I realise now just how influential the ideas behind that organisation have been on our own. From its legendary first production of Friel's TRANSLATIONS onwards, Field Day always opened its shows in the disputed and volatile city of Derry, before showing them on both sides of the border. This wasn't just tokenism: Field Day's plays were re-workings of established narratives, peoples' histories, which allowed audiences to see the deeply embedded conflicts of the present moment in a new and clearer light. That's also what we are trying to do when we make a piece with Latin American people in London, with Syrian refugees in Turkey, or with Palestinians in Ramallah. Like Field Day, we recognise the value as well as the challenges of working across the divide, and the importance of acknowledging how deeply we are ourselves, by virtue of historically formed identities, implicated in the tensions that we explore. 

Field Day was also a model for us in its understanding of the need for further exchanges, debates and conversations beyond what happened on the stage itself. They assembled a stellar board of directors: Seamus Heaney himself, Tom Paulin, Thomas Kilroy, David Hammond, Seamus Deane...  The guidance of distinguished artists and cultural figures at Governance or Patron level has been ever more crucial to us as the company has moved into ever more complex areas of artistic intervention: Peter Sellars as Patron; Jatinder Verma and Alastair Niven as Chairs; Conall Morrison, Kristine Landon-Smith and Niall Henry, all prominent directors; strategic and political thinkers like Malú Ansaldo, Valerie Synmoie and Roshni Mooneeram.... Like Field Day, we encourage them to become directly involved in the public discussions around our work: Peter's contribution to THE LOCKDOWN DIALOGUES was really significant in helping us respond to the changing landscape after Covid.

For Field Day, a crucial element of the discourse was the deeply important set of pamphlets which they published through the 1980s, particularly the first, in which Tom Paulin took A New Look at the Language Question. Paulin's advocacy of Irish English helped pave the way for the ongoing exploration of the politics of language in a shared post-colonial space that has characterised our theatre. In our second year, long before he became officially involved, Jatinder came to BAC to lead a post-show discussion on BRAVELY FOUGHT THE QUEEN, a play written in Indian English. What did that mean in terms of audience, of thought structures and worldview, of class, education and perspective? Almost every project since that time has been characterised by the use of multiple languages, and has challenged the hegemony of English through the employment of other languages and other Englishes. 

I am also very struck by Field Day's pamphlet number 6, Myth and Motherland, by the philosopher Richard Kearney. Of all the pamphlets, this one is the most abstracted, attempting to place the immediate turmoil of history within the larger structures and conflicts of myth. "What is required", he argues, "is a radical interrogation of those mythic sedimentations from our past and those mythic aspirations for our future which challenge our present sense of ourselves, which disclose other possibilities of being."  We have, says Kearney, "to keep our mythological images in dialogue with history."  Until I started to think about the significance of FAITH HEALER as the first of our 30 moments, I hadn't registered consciously just how much this dialogue between myth and historical process underpins our work. Sometimes it's really obvious: SUPPLIANTS OF SYRIA re-reads Aeschylus and current debates around refugees in the light of one another, while THE MOUTH OF THE GODS pushed contemporary Indigenous activism into a productive clash with evolving spiritualities. DIS-ORIENTATIONS used the traditional Chinese story of The Butterfly Lovers to explore gender and sexuality between Europe and Asia, and THIS FLESH IS MINE filtered Homer through a Palestinian lens. Sometimes it's more subtle: both BULLIE'S HOUSE and THE DILEMMA OF A GHOST saw a culture's treasured myths challenged by a modernity that seemed inadequate at best and at worst malign.

It's very powerful to think about things we were doing 30 years ago like this. It helps us to imagine where we might go next. THE LEGEND OF EUROPA beckons...

Brian Friel

Faith Healer (Finbar Lynch as Frank)

I first encountered Brian Friel's plays at University in the 80s.  A friend was in a student production of Translations.  It was not only the first Friel play I had seen, it was also the first post-colonial play.  I was studying history, and had an awareness of the context from with the ongoing Troubles sprang - but this was the first time I had seen theatre engage so powerfully and immediately with that complex shared past, leading its audience to re-assess the present.  At the centre of the play is the question of language, and Friel's theatrical device of delivering the whole text in English (the language of the audience) even when the characters are understood to be speaking Irish, was a glorious revelation.  Here was theatricality and comedy uniting stage and auditorium in an understanding of misunderstanding.  It was, I suppose, my Road to Damascus moment.  I have been travelling that rocky road ever since.

A few years later, I was in Dublin, doing a short period of study at Trinity, and was able to engage much more fully with Friel's work, coming to an understanding of his huge significance, not only as a dramatist, but as a cultural activist.  I read all his plays voraciously, and was lucky enough to see superb productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come (directed by Joe Dowling) and Faith Healer.  The latter would be one of the first plays Border Crossings ever presented, when in 1995-6, Richard Cave's production toured a series of overseas venues, acquiring new resonance and meaning as it responded to widely differing contexts.  The thought of it performing in Cairo seems extraordinary now, but Michael Keneally's review bears witness that, twenty years ago, it really did happen.

But for me, the most important influence of Brian Friel was in the form of the company he created with Stephen Rea, supported by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin - Field Day.  Inaugurated with Translations in 1980, Field Day was the first contemporary Irish company to operate through the entire island of Ireland: a statement made all the more powerful by the fact that its base, and first performances, were in Derry / Londonderry - a city which at that time was a by-word for The Troubles.  The programming saw the gradual emergence of a clear vision for cultural regeneration.  Productions of Chekov and Molière translated into an Irish idiom, new Irish-English versions of the Greek classics by Heaney and Paulin, new Irish plays and (perhaps most tellingly of all) Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena - all pointed up the centrality of language to meaningful political change.  The company went on to publish a series of pamphlets, starting with Paulin's A New Look at the Language Question, and a Dictionary of Irish English.  The entire project sought to regenerate the post-colonial space through the claiming of literary stature for Irish English, establishing a richer and more resonant language through the public practice of drama, enabling the possibility of new ideas and new expression within the emerging polity.  The heir of Synge and the ally of Fugard, Soyinka, Virahsawmy and Dattani - Brian Friel created a theatre that was genuinely transformative.  I believe that the current Northern Irish peace process owes far more to his endeavours than is acknowledged, and that the Irish future will be forged in the cultural revolution he began.

May he rest in peace.

Seamus Heaney

It isn't often that the death of a public figure moves me as Seamus Heaney's has done.  Don Patterson said that "the death of this beloved man seems to have left a breach in the language itself"- but I think it's more than that.  Poetry, and particularly the combination of the lyric and the political that characterised Heaney, is so personal, so intimate an art that the poet's persona comes to share the internal space of the reader.  When we lose a great poet, we lose someone to whom we are intensely close.  Put simply, a friend.

I first encountered this friend as a shy boy in my early teens, in a Hereford bookshop where I took lunchtime sanctuary from the baying bullies who haunted those years of emergence.  I remember weighing up the risk of buying the "Selected Poems", which tempted me because their writer seemed to mitigate the sissy discipline to which I was so drawn with a masculine, rural rigour that my persecutors might approve.  It cost me £1.95, and has been a treasure ever since.  On Friday, when his death was announced, I took it down again from the shelf and read that first manifesto, at once daunted and intensely determined:

"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it."

Later, in my first year at Oxford, a group of us would gather in someone's room or other to read our favourite lyrics - and I arrived clutching the same book, which now seemed a passport rather than a badge of exile.  Slowly, as we talked about the poems, I began to understand the complex relationship between these texts and the momentous context exploding in Ulster - to see how the history I was studying was as much a force in the intensity of "North" as the emotional and the psychological journey of their author.  They began to shape my own artistic voice.

Then, one day, the man himself was there.  We had lots of illustrious people visiting Oxford, to the extent that we got quite blasé about it: the Literary Society had welcomed Faye Weldon, Colin Welland, Stephen Spender and (wait for it) Enoch Powell that term: Seamus Heaney was for many another name on the roll-call.  So there were probably no more than thirty of us present to listen to him read in his soft brogue those well-known lines, to give them his personal music, and to hear him talk around them and about them without ever explaining them.  He was a gentle presence, secure in his wisdom without being in any way arrogant - wry and (I thought) genuinely pleased that there were young people there who responded to what he was saying and how he was saying it - people who shared his need to speak at a level only poetry sounds.  To dig ever deeper.  Far below the surface.

His work in theatre, especially the involvement with Field Day, was further inspiration to me - this is one of a number of key companies whose way of postulating theatre in a complex contemporary space of cross-cultural tensions has influenced the Artistic Direction of Border Crossings.

In 2008, there came his substitute for autobiography - the wonderful Stepping Stones interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll.  I gave a copy to my great friend Jay Griffiths, and it became as special a book to her as it was to me.  "Nurturing the flame" she said - Heaney writes so well about the calling of the artist, the intense need to find articulacy, the conviction that language must be brought back from the brink and re-forged as the weapon of compassion.  In her own recent book Kith, Jay calls this calling "the daemon" - and so it is.  The inner impulse that pulls the book from the shelf into the boy's hand, the muscularity that digs with the squat pen, the gentle rage of prophecy.