Stewart Parker

• Name — Stewart Parker • Birth Name — James Stewart Parker • Born — 20 October 1941 • Birthplace — Belfast, Northern Ireland • Died — 2 November 1988 • Place of death — London, United Kingdom • Occupation — Playwright, poet, columnist • Period — 1966-1988

Born into a working-class family at 86 Larkfield Road, Sydenham, East Belfast on 20 October 1941, James Stewart Parker was one of the post-Second World War generation to be the first in their family to attain third-level education. He attended Strand Primary School, then Ashfield Secondary and Sullivan Upper Schools. At Queen's University Belfast in the early 1960s, he was a founding member of the Belfast Writers' Group convened by Philip Hobsbaum, along with Seamus Heaney. But his long-term passion was theatre. Having been influenced as a schoolboy by the visionary teacher John Malone, he immersed himself in student drama as an undergraduate. His studies were interrupted for a time when he was diagnosed with a bone cancer that resulted in the amputation of his left leg. Parker later captured this experience in his novel Hopdance, edited by his biographer Marilynn Richtarik and published posthumously in 2017. After embarking on an MA at Queen’s University, he married Kate Ireland in 1964 and immediately left Belfast for the United States, where for several years he taught English literature at Hamilton College and Cornell University in upstate New York. His five years in the United States coincided with seismic cultural events, including the Civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. Parker's return to Ireland in 1969 coincided with another historical watershed: the outbreak of the conflict known as the Troubles, which reawakened the barely dormant tensions between Northern Ireland's Protestant and Catholic traditions. This conflict shaped the core of Parker’s work as a dramatist, which began as a features writer for BBC Radio.

Parker’s playwriting career began in earnest when his play Spokesong was the runaway success of the 1975 Dublin Theatre Festival. A production the following year in London at the King's Head Theatre subsequently transferred to the West End. The play was then produced at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1978 and by New York City’s Circle in the Square Theatre in 1979, as well as in numerous other venues around the world. Parker's second play, Catchpenny Twist, was produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1977, which also produced Nightshade, his exploration of death and dying conveyed through the prism of stage magic, in 1980. By this time, Parker had also established himself as a television dramatist, with the BBC Play for Today series airing Catchpenny Twist in 1977, the same year it premiered on stage. In 1979, Parker’s television play I'm a Dreamer Montreal, produced by Thames Television, won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. The history of Ireland was one of Parker's chief sources of dramatic material. Heavenly Bodies, commissioned by the Birmingham Rep, centred on the 19th-century theatrical entrepreneur Dion Boucicault and focused on the complexities of Irish national identity and literary recognition. Northern Star, produced by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in 1984, is the story of the United Irishmen and the doomed Rebellion of 1798, told through the life of Belfast revolutionary Henry Joy McCracken. Uniting political and theatre history, the narrative is developed through at least seven different ages or styles of Irish theatre, from George Farquhar to Samuel Beckett. Field Day, the Derry-based theatre company co-founded by Stephen Rea and Brian Friel, asked Parker in 1983 to write for them; he eventually gave the company what many consider to be his most profound play. Pentecost is set during the Ulster Workers' Council strike of 1974, when the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was stopped in its tracks by an insurrection fostered by Loyalists aiming to derail the power-sharing government established by the Sunningdale Agreement. Pentecost was received with a mixture of admiration and scepticism —in the wake of the hunger strikes and ongoing atrocities in Northern Ireland, it was hard to imagine the positive future suggested in the play.

Parker moved from Belfast to Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1978. His marriage ended shortly after a subsequent move to London, in 1982. His partnership with television writer Lesley Bruce helped to make the last seven years of his life the most satisfying, both personally and creatively.

Spokesong (1975) The Actress and the Bishop (1976) Catchpenny Twist (1977) Kingdom Come (an Irish/Caribbean musical, 1978) Nightshade (1980) Pratt’s Fall (1983) Northern Star (1984) Heavenly Bodies (1986) Pentecost (1987) Parker's stage plays are published by Methuen Drama. Stewart Parker: Plays 1 (2000) includes Spokesong, Catchpenny Twist, Nightshade and Pratt's Fall. Stewart Parker: Plays 2 (2000) includes Northern Star, Heavenly Bodies and Pentecost.

Catchpenny Twist (1977) I’m A Dreamer Montreal (1979) The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner (1981) Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain (1981) Joyce in June (1982) Radio Pictures (1985) Lost Belongings (1986)

Speaking of Red Indians (1967) Minnie and Maisie and Lily Freed (1971) Self Portrait (1971) Requiem (1973) The Iceberg (1975) I’m a Dreamer, Montreal (1977) The Kamikaze Ground Staff Reunion Dinner (1979) The Traveller (1985)

The Casualty’s Meditation (1966) Maw (1967) Paddy Dies (2004)

Hopdance: An Autobiographical Novel (2017), Lilliput Press