Word: belfasts
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NORTHERN IRELAND Violence Returns to Belfast Sectarian unrest is a regular summertime feature of life in Ulster, but the strife reached a disturbing new level last week when Protestant protesters blocked a group of Catholic children from going to their school in a divided area of north Belfast. The trouble quickly escalated into successive nights of rioting. Families on both sides were attacked in their homes, and more than 60 police officers were hurt trying to keep the factions apart. Police said the violence was largely orchestrated by Protestant paramilitaries who have turned against the Good Friday agreement...
...wrote the play for Hill, who co-starred in an early version staged in Belfast in 1994. Campion was recruited later when the play was remounted at Belfast's Lyric Theater in May 1999. The two actors have been joined at the hip ever since, as the play traveled to Dublin and Edinburgh and eventually to London's West End. (During one break, they co-starred as the tramps in Waiting for Godot. What's Irish for "busman's holiday"?) Hill, 36, the pudgy, cherub-faced one, grew up in Ballycastle, on the northeast coast. Campion, 41, the angular, rugged...
...arrived in New York with its production virtually unchanged. That includes, most crucially, Campion and Hill in the leading--and only--roles. They play two locals working on the film as extras, as well as (a gimmick born of economic necessity when the play was first staged in Belfast) every other character, from the diva-like Hollywood star and harried assistant director to an assortment of townspeople, like the boozy old codger who's the last surviving extra from John Wayne's The Quiet...
...Belfast playwright and actress Marie Jones based the play on her own encounters with Hollywood (she played Daniel Day-Lewis' mother in In the Name of the Father) and those of her husband--also the play's director--Ian McElhinney, who has had bit roles in such films as Michael Collins. The blarney-filled Hollywood romance being filmed in the play bears some resemblance to Far and Away (which starred those Irish favorites Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman), but Jones insists she isn't skewering any single movie or star but simply trying to show what happens "when the wagon...
...Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) as against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its political front Sinn Fein. But the process is stuck in neutral, perhaps drifting backward. Last week, British prime minister Tony Blair and his Irish counterpart Bertie Ahern convened talks with Ulster politicians at Hillsborough Castle near Belfast. All the pomp and glitter, and an IRA statement that it was talking again with the international body in charge of putting paramilitary weapons beyond use, could not hide the lack of tangible progress on a Rubik's Cube of sticking points. Unionists want the IRA not just...