Life
1945- [var. J. Graham]; b. Belfast, of Protestant working-class parents;
left school at 15; m. at 20; British Army and other jobs; returned to
education at 26, and grad. QUB 1976; taught history in schools, and turned
to full-time writing, 1980; first plays The Death of Humpty Dumpty
(Abbey, 6 Sept. 1979), in which a schoolteacher who witnesses a sectarian
killing is tracked and shot by paramilitaries, but survives in a physically
and sexually humiliated condition, reeking emotional vengeance on his
family until he is suffocated by his son David; The Closed Door
(Peacock, 28 April 1980), set in a paramilitary shebeen; The Hidden
Curriculum (1982) and Remembrance (1984) [var. 1985], dealing
with working-class hardship; The Callers (1985); followed by Billy:
Three Plays for Television (1982-87), an account of a working-class
Belfast Protestant family’s response when the youngest son falls
in love with a Catholic nurse; produced by BBC NI with career-launching
role for Kenneth Branagh as Billy (Too Late to Talk to Billy,
1982; A Matter of Choice for Billy, 1983; A Coming to Terms
for Billy, 1984), for television, dealing with familial pressures
amid violent social conflict; proved screen-vehicle for Kenneth Branagh
as Billy; Samuel Beckett Award, 1984; Ties of Blood (1985), for
television, deals with the army and its impact on civilians; appointed
QUB Writer-in-Residence and Stranmillis College; You, Me and Marley
(1992) dealing with the rejection of a Belfast teenager by the IRA when
he tries to join to avenge the killing of his brothers by the army
and by loyalists; Blood of the Lamb [q.d.], filmed by BBC2 in Belfast,
May 1996; Dying for a Mother, BBC radio play, 2001. DIW FDA OCIL
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Works
The Death of Humpty Dumpty (Dublin: Writers’ Co-Op 1980);
The Closed Door (Co-Op 1980); Plays incl. Too Late to Talk to
Billy; Dorothy; The Hidden Curriculum (Co-Op 1982);
Billy: Three Plays for Television (London: Faber & Faber 1984);
Remembrance (Faber 1985); Ties of Blood (London: Faber &
Faber 1986); also ‘Comings and Goings’, Threshold, No.
35 (Winter 1984/85), pp.21-25.
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Criticism
D. E. S. Maxwell, A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980
(Cambridge UP 1984), pp.185-86.
P. Campbell, ‘Graham Reid - Professional’, in The Linen Hall Review, 1, 2 (Summer 1984), pp.4-7.
Lynda Henderson, ‘The Green Shoot’: Transcendence and Imagination in contemporary Ulster Drama’, in Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley, eds., Across the Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland (Belfast: Blackstaff 1985), pp.196-217 [chiefly 200-215].
E. Fitzgibbon, ‘All Change: Contemporary Fashions in the Irish Theatre’, in M Sekine, ed. Irish Writers and the Theatre (Gerrards Cross 1986), pp.35-37.
M. Etherton, Contemporary Irish Dramatists (Macmillan 1989), pp.33-38.
Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, ‘A Failure of Realism, ‘Review of Ties of Blood, in Honest Ulsterman, 83 [q.d.], p.73.
Nina Witoszeck & Patrick Sheeran, ‘The Tradition of
Vernacular Hatred’, in Geert Lernout, ed., The Crows Behind the
Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama [Costerus
Ser. Vol. 79] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1991), pp.11-27.
Jane Coyle, ‘Jane Coyle talks to Graham Reid’ (The Irish Times, 29 Aug. 1995).
Paul Nolan, review of You, Me and Marley, Fortnight (Nov. 1992).
Eddie Holt, TV review The Precious Blood, Irish Times, 15 June 1996, Weekend, p.5.
[Q.A.,] Irish Times, 25 Nov. 2000, review of Dying for a Mother.
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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field
Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects The Death of Humpty Dumpty [1204-07];
Richard Kearney notes transitional paradigms in the revision of unionist
culture (Transitions, 1980), 633n; less puckish than Stewart Parker,
[his plays develop the standpoint] of the bystander, the ‘innocent’
onlooker caught up in violence; The glib Slobber in The Closed Door
(1980) lives dangerously around the rackets of Belfast political gangs;
beaten, stabbed, blinded, he dies slowly outside the house of a friend
too scared to help, who tries to redeem himself by lies humiliatingly
exposed; in a programme note to The Death of Humpty-Dumpty (1979),
Reid remarks upon the experience of Belfast hospitals ... : There was
often the question "Why me? I am innocent?" The protagonist
is George Samson, schoolteacher, genial father, vain, cautious philanderer;
shot to prevent bearing witness to a terrorist killing, he is paralysed
from the neck down; set in his hospital ward, dissolves to his ruinous
visits home and his former life; records physical indignities of his condition,
deteriorating will, embittered tyranny over family; Gerry Doyle, a hospital
friend, also crippled, defies self-pity by harsh raillery and fortitude,
but is killed in an accident after his discharge; his voice opens and
closes the play; George’s son Gerry smothers him in his bed: ‘We
can’t take you home ... But I can’t leave you here’. Careful
domesticity shattered by hoodlum politics [revealing] pretences, weaknesses,
etc.; Reid’s television work explores private insecurities, bordered
by public upheaval, associated as metaphors of each other [Christopher
Murray, ed.], 1139-40; BIOG, 1306 [as above].
D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama, (Cambridge UP 1984), bibl. lists only The Death of Humpty-Dumpty (Dublin: Co-Op Books 1980).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)