Ourselves Alone by Anne Devlin - Research Paper Example

The setting of the play is generally around Andersonstown, West Belfast, with succinct side tracks to South Belfast and Dublin. The play has been produced, directed, and enacted manifold times. One presentation is by Crash Box Players and Lost Angels, directed by Steven Friedland, and produced by Kathleen Dunn, Laura Niemi and Elise Robertson. The cast of the play includes Jake Alston (as Danny/Second Soldier), Kelly Boulware (as Cathal/First Soldier), Ed Cunningham (as John McDermot), Kathleen Dunn (as Donna), Darrel Guilbeau (as Gabriel/Policeman), David Lane (as musician), Jack Mungovan (as Liam/Musician), Laura Niemi (as Frieda), Elise Robertson (as Josie), Joel Stoffer (as Joe Conran), and Joseph Whipp (as Malachy).

The cast is very talented, giving extra beauty to the theme of the play. The play made its appearance in London during 1985-86. Anne Devlin, the daughter of a controversial labor leader in Belfast, Paddy Devlin, has attempted to accomplish a surmountable job telling the story of the Belfast when it was seeing some of the worst days of its history, through weaving of the story related to three Catholic women, whose lives underwent many changes brought about by the ongoing incidents and happenings in Belfast.

Anne Devlin shows, in the play, how men reveal their macho by converting the society into a war zone. These men also included those who were struggling for the Irish independence, who were unknowingly converting the community into a zone of never-ending siege. Culture was being ignored. Family lives were suffering. “…where women suffer a double oppression--subjugated as much by their brothers, fathers, husbands, and lovers as by the Brits. Ourselves Alone tries to expose the ugliness of the Belfast blood knot”, writes Adler (para.2). It was hard to decide where Belfast was heading to.

The storyline revolves around three ordinary Catholic women, including two Andersonstown sisters, Donna and Josie McCoy, and their brother’s wife, Frieda, who has been a Long Kesh prisoner, as shown in the play’s early scenes. Donna is kind of superficial, Josie possesses a strange hidden agenda, and Frieda is shown struggling with life in order to bring up her infant alone, when her husband is in prison. Frieda’s pro-IRA father has disowned her, and she wants to be a singer but her father sends her into the arms of a Workers' Party organizer and anti-IRA zealot.

All three of the Catholic women wish and struggle to escape the political peril that is affecting their lives, but they cannot take a step because they are bound to the family loyalties residing in their hearts. Their complex relationships with men are also a hurdle. Donna waits for her lover for five years who is in prison, but when he comes out of the jail, she finds that he is not the kind of man who was worth waiting for. Josie has been a courier when rebellion against the British was going on, and has interest in politics of the trouble going in the Ireland; yet, she is trapped inside her wish for a romantic relationship.

She fancies the men in her life, who are there to subjugate her. She is in love with an IRA leader, but is also in a relationship. She gets pregnant with her partner. What is interesting about the play is that Devlin’s Catholic women are not the rebellious heroines of the Ireland. Instead, they are making victims of themselves by not reacting against the harsh circumstances, keeping