ON Wednesday, a new play by one of the North's most outspoken and courageous young writers opens at the Peacock Theatre. Gary Mitchell describes In A Little World Of Our Own as having been written "from the hard land. I didn't have to research it because I am it."
Born and brought up in the hardline loyalist heartland of Belfast's Rathcoole estate, where he still lives, Mitchell has devoted his writing career to portraying, in often harshly uncompromising terms, a community besieged by fear and mistrust. He makes no secret of the fact that the authenticity and truthfulness of this and previous plays, such as Independent Voice and That Driving Ambition, stems directly from personal experience. "I am a working-class Protestant who grew up in a family of active loyalism. As a family, we made the journey of going through the fact that violence and the armed struggle are not the way forward. And that represents the current struggle within Protestantism."
Mitchell joins a long line of Northern playwrights whose work has been premiered in Dublin. Not least among those are Graham Reid and Stuart Parker - both, like himself, Belfast Protestants, though both, in Mitchell's view, writing about the working classes from an arm's-length, middle class perspective. He sees himself as a lone voice, putting forward the philosophies and political preoccupations of his community.
"What I am hoping to address here is that Protestantism has been misrepresented over the years - by the media, by the theatre, by film-makers ... and by (Protestants) themselves.
"There is a deep mistrust of the media and a paranoia that only one side of the story is ever told - the other side. Admittedly, they have made mistakes by not coming forward with their own stories and versions of events, for fear of being misinterpreted.
"The other problem is that Protestantism is deeply divided internally at the moment and the voices we do hear need to be replaced from within. It's a hard road but people are beginning to walk it."
THE play, whose cast is entirely made up of Northern actors - Stuart Graham, Sean Kearns, Lalor Roddy, Mark O'Shea and Andrea Irvine - and which is directed by Conall Morrison from Armagh (described by Mitchell as "a brilliant guy"), explores, from a family perspective, those extremities within the Protestant community to which the writer alludes.
At the centre are two brothers, one a hardline paramilitary, the other a born-again Christian; the one rock-solid in his beliefs, the other steeped in confusion and uncertainty. "It represents an exploration of my own past and previous psychology," says Mitchell. "With the exception of the young retarded brother, there's a bit of me in all those characters."