Translating ‘gaytown’: the collision of global and local in bringing Australian queer play Bison to Belfast.

Sydney playwright Lachlan Philpott’s Bison (2000/2009) is immersed in a sweaty, summery Antipodean scene of bronzed and toned bodies. It is located in the flora and fauna of gum trees and biting ants. Yet, despite this, it could be argued that at its heart it is not a specifically Australian site, but an all-too translatable scene that seems to be played out in gay clubs, bars, chatrooms and saunas around the Western world: men repeating patterns, looking for sex or love; checking out bodies, craving perfection; avoiding, and occasionally seeking, disease. At least, that was my assumption when I decided to direct the play in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2009. Philpott came to Belfast to workshop the play with the actors and, as a group, we restructured the play and tried to find a way to ‘de-Australianise’ it without necessarily placing it in a new geographical place - Northern Ireland - through linguistic clues in the text. As Philpott put it: ‘Let’s not make this play about Belfast or Sydney or London or anywhere because it is not a fair reflection of these scenes. Maybe we should just identify the generic elements of this world and then make Bison a play that reflects gaytown – because the rituals are all the same in Western society’. The experience of doing the play in Belfast made clear, however, that ideas of a global gay identity/experience –though highly marketed – fail to account for the vastly different situations of embodied gay experience. And the Northern Irish gay experience, while it has imported the usual ‘generic’ tropes of gayness, sits within a specific cultural context in which the farsighted legislation on equality for gays (imposed by either London or the EU) vastly outstrips wider societal thinking. For many in Northern Ireland, erstwhile MP Iris Robinson’s comments about homosexuality being an ‘abomination’ were a reason to support her, rather than to reject her. For me, the comments were the catalyst to doing Bison in Belfast.

The discursive turn in policy analysis and the validation of policy stories

This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how ‘readings’ of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N=20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000-2009. Following an identification of some key characteristics of narrative structure the authors indicate how text-mining strategies allied with features of semantic and network analysis can be used to unravel the basic elements of policy stories and to facilitate the presentation of data in such a way that readers can verify the strengths (and weaknesses) of any given analysis – with regard to claims concerning, say, the presence, absence, or relative importance of key ideas and concepts. Readers can also ‘see’ how the different components of any one story might fit together, and to get a sense of what has been excluded from the narrative as well as what has been included, and thereby assess the reliability and validity of interpretations that have been placed upon the data.