AS the curtain falls in the theatre, the sweetest sound to an actor's ears is not the spontaneous thunder of rapturous clapping, but the stunned silence of a response that goes too deep for applause. Conditions were hardly conducive to profound thought and contemplation at the recent preview in London of Graham Reid's powerful new television drama The Precious Blood, produced by BBC Northern Ireland and screened on the BBC 2 network this evening.
A motley assortment of Irish and British journalists huddled together in a basement film theatre in Soho, on one of the stickiest days of this year, to watch what producer Tony Rowe had cautiously described as ... "work in progress". But, as actors Amanda Burton and Kevin McNally watched their screen images fade from view, they could not have wished for a more eloquently expressed reaction to their efforts. In the long silence that followed, you could have heard a pin drop.
The Precious Blood is the natural successor to Reid's hugely successful Screen Two film Life After Life, produced last year by BBC Northern Ireland and selected as BBC Television's entry in the fiction category of this month's Prix Italia.
The Precious Blood was filmed entirely in Belfast over a gruelling three week shooting schedule and reaches the screen less than two months later. "It is extremely topical," says executive producer Robert Cooper. "It had to be made quickly to keep that topicality. The tight schedule made tremendous demands upon director John Woods, the cast and the whole production team, but I think that the finished product is a just reward for all our efforts and shows Graham's fine script off to its full advantage.
"The inspiration for it came when Graham and I went to see a production of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden in Belfast shortly after we finished making Life After Life. Dorfman's play deals with a young South American woman's confrontation with the man whom she believes was her torturer, many years earlier.
"We talked about making a film that would look at the way in which you cope with the knowledge that you are living in the same town as someone who has destroyed your life. Thus, in a neat complement to Lengthening Shadows, his last play for the theatre, Reid returns to Belfast in the early, precarious days of the IRA ceasefire, where the quest for "peace with justice" is tearing the heart out of many families, who have lost friends and loved ones in the violence of the past 25 years.
With characteristic honesty and directness, he revisits the territory he spoke about so passionately when his stage play was premiered at the Lyric in Belfast last September.
In an interview with this newspaper he talked of meeting man people, who "feel betrayed by the ceasefire. They believe that in this atmosphere of goodwill to all those who killed their loved ones will not be pursued. There is a real feeling that the killers will be allowed to get away with it. The survivors are condemned to go on living; that's the reality."
One of those survivors is Rosie Willis (Amanda Burton), a young Catholic woman whose Protestant husband Paul was shot dead beside her in bed, apparently by the IRA, 12 years earlier. Their son John was four years old and she was pregnant with their daughter Pauline. The killers were never found and Rosie, who has lived every day since with the same unanswered questions in her mind, has been unable to pick up the shreds of her shattered life. Now, with the peace process starting to gain momentum, she quietly begins to look for those answers.
DERRY born Burton gives a rivetingly brave performance in the demanding central role. Though personally a mil on miles removed from her own middle class Northern background, she gained great respect and admiration for the character of Rosie and for the legion of women, who, like her, have survived enormous personal tragedy, while struggling, single handed, to support and bring up young families.
"Rosie's strength lies in her deep emotions," reflects Burton. "In her strength and resolve, she is not so different from the other roles I have played. But she's not a Sam Ryan (Silent Witness) or a Beth Glover (Peak Practice). They are professional women with a network of high level contacts. Rosie is a cleaner, for God's sake. Who does she turn to in this horrendous situation? She has to find the resources within herself."
Like Burton, Kevin McNally, who plays the born again preacher, whose life and personal history become unexpectedly entwined with Rosie's, found that the intensity and immediacy of the filming schedule made heavy mental and emotional demands upon him.
"This drama is damned near Greek in the scale of the emotions it is portraying," he says. "I was shocked by the extremes of hopes and expectations that we encountered when we were making it, and the fact that it is so topical meant that it was very important that, as actors, we should get it as right and as authentic as humanly possible. Reid is asking exactly the questions that are being asked on the ground in Belfast, to which there are no easy answers. There are no party lines being played out here."
The piece is dark and difficult, that's true. It is also very, very truthful.