you CAN talk, you CAN compromise and everyone CAN win so there is no loser

Gary Mitchell was born in Rathcoole, North Belfast in 1965 and left Rathcoole Secondary School at the age of fifteen. In 1990 he wrote his first radio play, which won a BBC Radio 4 Young Playwrights Festival Award, and in 1995 became the first Protestant and first person from Northern Ireland to win the Stewart Parker Award. In 1998, IN A LITTLE WORLD OF OUR OWN won the Irish Times Theatre Award for best new play and was performed for the Abbey Theatre's first ever visit to the Lyric, Belfast. Also in 1998, Gary won the Belfast Drama Award for IN A LITTLE WORLD OF OUR OWN and SINKING, and was made Writer in Residence at the Royal National Theatre, London. He has gone on to win the Pearson Best New Play prize for TRUST, and for THE FORCE OF CHANGE both the George Devine Award and the Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright.

FILM & TV:
2004 SEXTON 2 x 60' episodes in progress
Straight Face Productions / BBC Northern Ireland

2003/4 ENERGY
Feature adaptation of own play, at treatment stage
World Productions / FilmFour

2003/4 FEUD1 x 120
TV film in progress.
BBC Northern Ireland

2003/4 THE FORCE OF CHANGE
3 x 60 series in progress.
BBC Northern Ireland

2003 SUFFERING
Short film. Writer and Director Producer: Tony Rowe
Straight Face Productions / BBC Northern Ireland
* Best Short Film, Belfast Film Festival.

2001/02 AS THE BEAST SLEEPS
Single TV Film.Producer: Tony Rowe. Director: Harry Bradbeer
London Film Festival: 14/11/01 (NFT2) & 16/11/01 (Ritzy) BBC2 Transmission: Sunday 3rd Feb 02, 10pm. BBC Northern Ireland / BBC2* Screened at Edinburgh Film Festival 2001, and at Edinburgh Showcase in New York. Will also show at London, Montreal, Belfast, Wales, Gothenburg, Boston & New York Festivals. At London Film Festival on 14th and 16th November 01, and on LFF UK tour.* Third Place, Prix Europa 2002* Winner, Belfast Arts Award for Television 2002

2000/01 ONCE UPON A TIME IN BELFAST
Original feature script. DNA Films

1998 AN OFFICER FROM FRANCE
Broadcast November 1998. Starring Adrian Dunbar
.
RTE 1998 RED, WHITE AND BLUE
Documentary. Broadcast January 1998.,

BBC1 / Brian Waddell Productions

THEATRE:
2005 UNTITLED NEW PLAY
Royal Court Theatre

2003 DECEPTIVE IMPERFECTIONS
North Face Theatre Company, Belfast

2003 SPLINTERS
Script in progress
Tricycle Theatre

2003 LOYAL WOMEN
For production November 2003. Director: Josie Rourke Royal Court Downstairs

2002 REMORSE
Abbey Theatre, Dublin

2001 AS THE BEAST SLEEPS27th April - 19th May 2001
Lyric Theatre, Belfast2001 AS THE BEAST SLEEPS18th September - 20th October 01
Directed by John Sheehan
Tricycle Theatre, London

2001 MARCHING ON Tour of Scotland 29 March - 12th May.
7:84 Theatre Company

2000 THE FORCE OF CHANGE Royal Court Downstairs November 2000Royal Court Upstairs April 2000* Winner of Evening Standard Charles Wintour Award for Most Promising Playwright. * Joint winner of the George Devine Award* Nominated for a South Bank Show Award

2000 MARCHING ON Lyric Theatre, Belfast

2000 CONVICTIONS: 'HOLDING CELL'One of 7 short plays performed in Crumlin Road Courthouse, Belfast.Tinderbox Theatre Company* Winner of ESB Irish Times Best Production Award

1999 ENERGY The Playhouse, Londonderry

1999 TRUST Royal Court Upstairs & Eureka Theatre, San Francisco* Winner of Pearson Best Play of the Year award

1998 AS THE BEAST SLEEPS National Theatre Society /Abbey Theatre, Dublin

1998 TEARING THE LOOM Lyric Theatre, Belfast

1997 IN A LITTLE WORLD OF OUR OWN Abbey Theatre / Lyric Belfast /National Theatre Society /Abbey Theatre, Dublin / Donmar Theatre, London* Winner of Irish Theatre's Best New Play Award, 1997* Winner of Belfast Arts Drama Award, 1998

1997 SINKING Replay Theatre CompanyTheatre in Education*Winner of Belfast Arts Drama Award 1998

1995 THAT DRIVING AMBITION Replay Theatre CompanyTheatre in Education

ALTERNATIVE FUTURE

EXODUS

SUSPICIOUS MINDS

INDEPENDENT VOICE

RADIO:
2001 AS THE BEAST SLEEPS
Script in progress
BBC RADIO 4

1996 DRUMCREE
BBC RADIO 4* Shortlisted for Sony Award

1995 POISON HEARTS
BBC RADIO 4

1995 STRANDED
BBC RADIO 3

1995 INDEPENDENT VOICE (repeat broadcast) BBC RADIO 4* Winner of Stewart Parker Award (BBC Radio Drama), 1994

1991 THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL BBC RADIO 4* Award winner, Young Playwrights' Festival

PUBLICATIONS
THE FORCE OF CHANGE, TRUST and TEARING THE LOOM & IN A LITTLE WORLD OF OUR OWN (one volume) are all published by Nick Hern Books.

source - PFD

Celebrate artists, don't burn them like Lundy
It is a terrible thing to hear of a child so scared he says to his mother, "I'm going to die, amn't I?" This is what Alison Mitchell's seven-year-old said to her after men petrol bombed their home in Glengormley two weeks ago. She was terrified her son might be right. Her father-in-law, Chuck, took a heart attack. Alison's husband, Gary, ran after the attackers but they got away. The family was told to get out of the area and they are now staying with relatives.
Chuck and his wife had already been intimidated out of their home in Rathcoole. The thugs who did this would call themselves loyalists but this wasn't the usual sectarian intimidation of a Catholic family out of a Protestant area.
Gary Mitchell is a Protestant. He is a writer. He has, in a series of excellent and award-winning plays and films, given a voice to the angry men of loyalism. He has presented their dilemmas to the world and demanded that they be understood. He is passionately committed to his own people.
When I interviewed him for my book Northern Protestants – An Unsettled People in 1998, I asked him why he was so determined to stay in the place he'd grown up. He was already a highly respected dramatist and had been appointed writer in residence at the National Theatre in London. Unmarried then, he was living with his parents in Rathcoole, flying to London only when necessary. "Why should I leave?" he replied. "It is important for me to stay here and keep in touch with the people I'm in touch with. If you are not aware of how things are changing, you'll lose the detail and you'll write a lot of nonsense."
At the same time, a community worker in Rathcoole talked to me about how she was in high demand to sit on management committees for local groups because funding agencies required professional people to be involved. "In Protestant areas those people have cleared off," she said. "Our ones leave and don't look back." She also talked about destructive ways of thinking among working-class Protestants, defeatism and apathy. "There is also this thing of wanting to drag people down. You know. 'Who does he think he is? What would he know anyway.'"
Mitchell said he felt he'd been "psychologically damaged before I was born". He talked about what he'd learned at school. "How to talk my way out of difficult situations. How to take punches and kicks. How to get up and walk away." He hated it. Later on, he spoke to a careers teacher about wanting to be a writer. The response? "Well you can forget about that for a start." The teacher told the teenager he had no choice and no chance and then how to go and sign on the dole.
The painter, Dermot Seymour, who is from the Shankill Road, told me that being a Northern Protestant for him was "like having no head, in the sense that your are not allowed to think – there is this constant putting each other down so that no one moves. It is a world of inferiority complex." There was a "pride in being ignorant". An artist got slagged off as a homosexual. If you were different, you were 'a Lundy'. Lundy was the Protestant governor who proposed a "timely capitulation" to end the 1688 siege of Derry. He was driven out as a traitor.
Mitchell was on the dole for years, doing 'murky' things. When he did a drama course, his peers said acting was for "Taigs and faggots". However, he forged his path. "I made the journey through violence and out the other end. I learned that you CAN talk, you CAN compromise and everyone CAN win so there is no loser." This is a lesson loyalists have been trained by their political leaders NOT to learn.
In one of Mitchell's plays, a politician tells a paramilitary lieutenant to speak to the foot soldiers about knocking off the violence. He replies: "They don't talk. They don't listen. They follow orders. I made them that way." Mitchell has eloquently explained the mindset of those who turned on him. One of his plays is called In a Little World of Our Own. Another is As the Beast Sleeps. Artists like him should be celebrated by their people and supported by all of us. Not burned and banished. They burned Lundy in Derry last weekend. They do it every year.

(Susan McKay, Irish News) December 7, 2005
source - Newshound

Loyalist paramilitaries drive playwright from his home
One of the most talked about voices in European theatre is in hiding - and his extended family have been forced to flee their homes - after a campaign of death threats and bomb attacks by loyalist paramilitaries.
Gary Mitchell, whose political thrillers have arguably made him Northern Ireland's greatest playwright, was told that every "Mitchell had to get out or be killed in four hours". His home was attacked by men with baseball bats and petrol bombs.
Brought up on the sprawling Rathcoole estate in north Belfast which is dominated by the UDA, Mitchell is the authentic voice of working class loyalism, whose plays, including As the Beast Sleeps and the Force of Change, have shocked audiences in London and New York with the ugly truth about how paramilitary thugs still control their communities long after "peace".Remarkably, while critics raved at the way he dramatised feuds and power-struggles within loyalists gangs, and the collusion between gunmen and the police, he managed to continue living on the same streets where they held sway.
Despite police warnings that he was on the top of a death list - and should not drink in local pubs - Mitchell insisted on staying put, saying he needed to be close to the people he was writing about.To begin with, the paramilitaries' prejudice that culture was something only for "taigs and faggots" protected him. But after his acclaimed As The Beast Sleeps was filmed by the BBC, and he began to win international prizes, it began to get serious. One UDA leader told the makers they could only film on the estate if they didn't use cameras.
Last month, Mitchell's home was attacked by paramilitaries carrying baseball bats, their faces hidden by football scarves. His car was petrol bombed and exploded in his driveway. His wife, Alison, grabbed their seven-year-old son from his bed, ran outside with him, put him over a wall and threw herself on top of him to protect him. She said: "I heard an explosion and I thought they've killed Gary."There was a simultaneous attack on his uncle's home. By then his uncle was the only family member left in Rathcoole.
From a secret location, Mitchell told the Guardian: "We are in hiding now. I feel a mix of confusion, anger, frustration and despair. There is a feeling that certain people are jealous and feel that I am depicting them in a bad way. They have decided that they will do this no matter what anybody says ... I haven't done anything other than write."Some say the way to deal with this is to sit down with paramilitaries and ask them why they are doing this. I have no interest in doing that because I don't want to give people authority over my writing. If I negotiated with them, I would be recognising their authority, which I don't."Mitchell's pensioner parents were the first to feel the intimidation when they were told: "All the Mitchells have four hours to leave Rathcoole or they will be killed." Sandra and Chuck Mitchell had lived in their home for 50 years, but had to leave. His father is now in hospital.
Mitchell's grandmother, Sadie, was allowed to stay alone in a small flat. She died five months later.The Mitchells were told they could not return to Rathcoole for the funeral. "We had to have a police escort. My granny always wanted to be buried from her house. That had to be changed because police said it wasn't safe. When they were taking the coffin out, a man shouted: 'One Mitchell dead!' These are the sorts of things you don't forget."
Tommy Kirkham of the Ulster Political Research Group, which advises the UDA, said he had been assured the UDA was not behind the attacks. Mitchell has been told rogue elements may have targeted him.The Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson has organised an open letter in support of Mitchell with 30 other writers.

Angelique Chrisafis, Ireland correspondent
Wednesday December 21, 2005

source - Guardian Unlimited