By Andrew Hinds

Since the early years of the twentieth century there has been a battle in Ireland between the dramatists and the political class for full possession of reality. The problem was effectively emphasised by Yeats and Lady Gregory who offered "Cathleen ni Houlihan" to the public, with Maud Gonne as the eponymous heroine, in 1902. The young zealous nationalists, full of solemnity and what Yeats would later called passionate intensity, filled the theatre night after night. This was the only time their dreams and the dreams of the playwrights merged.

The terms of the divergence between the political idealists and the writers was set soon afterwards by "The Playboy of the Western World". Just as the Irish peasant and the life of the west of Ireland were being idealised by Patrick Pearse and Douglas Hyde, by Yeats and Lady Gregory, Synge wrote a play in which Irish peasants were presented as brazen and pagan; the anti-heroic impulse of the play drove the nationalists to riot in the theatre. So, too, less than twenty years later, when the nationalists had fought their war and were hungry for glory, Sean O'Casey offered them a version of their Irish revolution which was less than glorious.

Both Synge and O'Casey were lucky to have a ready-made opposition; the Ireland dreamed up by the politicians offered them an intense need to tell the real truth, to show on the stage a version of things which was missing from the official version.

The Irish theatre in the twentieth century has sought to create a world which is in opposition to the accepted political rhetoric. It has been, for the most part, a public theatre, concerned to show how damaged and disturbed the private self has been by public life. The plays of Andrew Hinds, "October Song" and "The Starving", attempt to establish terms for our understanding of the Irish past which have enormous political resonance. These two plays attempt to redefine our politics: they insist that the personal is political. And in Ireland in the 1990s when these plays were written, this remains an explosive idea, and one which continues to be resisted.

His Derry is a place with a resonant history, full of ballads and heroes, monuments and long memories. The intensity of his two plays arises from the size and scope of the opposition to what is being dramatised. Hinds's plays are attempting to push through the boom by suggesting that it is private life which has been most maimed in the city, the most private self which needs to cry out in these plays. And this is done using the city's public history as background.

Maggie in "October Song" appears as Medea and Electra merged into one fearless and wounded voice. She seeks revenge and she will damage her son as she prepares to kill her father. The burning city will be placed as parody and masque while she stands in the foreground. What changes everything is the knowledge that the hurt done to her was not done in the public sphere, but privately at home by her father. And yet her anger fills the stage as public anger. Her banishment from the city becomes in the theatre the hidden truth, the truth worth knowing, about the city whose public life her father sought to serve. Her sisters, in all their acquiescence and timidity, appear as Chrysothemis does to Electra, or Ismene to Antigone.

Maggie's tone and voice take their bearings from the Greek theatre; the play also owes much more to certain works by Ibsen and Ingmar Bergman than to any of Hinds's Irish contemporaries. In general, the Irish dramatists have resisted the relentless intensity which these two plays offer. In Ibsen's "Ghosts" or Bergman's "Autumn Sonata", the sins of the parents cannot be forgiven because they have not been aired, the conflict cannot be resolved because it has not been dramatised. The play then takes place in the time when words are uttered that have never been said before. These words are electric.

"The Starving" takes this and pushes it further. There is a gnarled intensity in its tone, a sense of things being said in both the 1990s, when the play was performed, and the 1690s, when it is set, that would have equally serious consequences. The personal here is all that matters, the pursuit of forbidden love becomes more pressing and urgent than the battle for the city between Catholics and Protestants. This is an explosive idea, as explosive in the Ireland of the Celtic Tiger and the Peace Process as it was during the siege of Derry. Once more, a battle rages in the theatre, requiring a virtuoso actor, who will make love and pain seem more urgent than anything else in the world.

History then, the history that matters, is here in these plays. What happened to Maggie nineteen years before "October Song" begins, or what happens to the love that dares and dares not speak its name in "The Starving", these manage what we ask all good writing to do. What they enact stirs us and haunts us and makes us afraid; these two plays remind us of the plight of others, and, miraculously, while we are not noticing, they remind us of our own plight.

Andrew Hinds's Derry is not an imagined place. It is the real city, with its history and politics. What he has done is put a new flag over it. What he has imagined and what his plays enact seem more real to us and more true and more urgent than the official history. He has brought two broken lives out to the front of the stage, two figures broken by the fear of sexuality, whether a young woman's sexuality or a man's love for another man, and with the help of the shaping imagination and careful crafting, has made them public and relentless and unforgettable.

Colm Tóibín