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A History of Roleplaying

In preparation for this talk, I met Roddy Buchanan last Friday and he gave me a walking tour of the exhibition. As we talked our way from room to room, I couldn't help thinking of a passage somewhere in Sartre in which he describes a waiter arriving for work in a restaurant. The waiter goes out the back and dresses in his waiter's outfit, then, as he returns wearing his uniform, the man behaves differently. He appears to have put on a new role, a mask, a different identity, and becomes almost a self-parody as he launches himself into that role.

Sartre writes: "His movements are animated and accentuated, a little too precise, a little too quick: he approaches the customers a little too speedily, he inclines a little too eagerly, his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too full of solicitude for the wish of the customer. He is playing . . . He is playing at being a waiter."

To the extent that he is playing a role, Sartre's waiter is a victim of self-deception, of bad-faith. In fact, Sartre says we are all in danger of the same self-deception: concealing the truth about ourselves from ourselves, playing a role, following someone else's script, pretending to be rather than being as we are.

This philosophical examination of role-playing emerges between the lines of Roderick Buchanan's exhibition too. 'Histrionics' -- from the Latin, histrio, meaning a stage player, and denoting the theatrical, acting, performance, a style that is overly theatrical or melodramatic, or that which is dramatically exaggerated to the point of pretense.

When Tony Blair, one of our most accomplished stage players, told a Belfast press pack that he "felt the hand of history" on his shoulder, some detected the hand of "histrionics" instead. But the hand (and feet and head) of history are everywhere to be seen in this exhibition by Roddy Buchanan--an exhibition that reminds us that we are all players in one way or another.

The feet: because Roddy's personal history links a passion for football and a curiosity about what it means to kick with the other foot. He continues that exploration of sometimes competing or colliding identities here. The signing-day pictures of players from Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers are framed for exhibition in an art gallery: two teams, two sides, and we, the viewers, find ourselves negotiating the space between them.

The head: because Roddy Buchanan is essentially a portraitist, though one who complicates and deconstructs that form to reveal sometimes unsettling insights. Within ancient Hebrew and classical Christian liturgy, antiphonal worship is the singing or musical playing of psalms by alternating groups of performers interacting with each other. And so, not far from the football players are the flute players. A Loyalist flute band and a Republican flute band are re-cast in an accidental antiphony. They are dressed for the part, as one band performs, marches, and plays music to accompany the other band's rest period. The performance is as much cultural and personal as it is musical and territorial - and, unwittingly kitsch too (look out for the US marine corps headdress worn by one of the bands for no better reason than it looks the part). Yet somehow the music of one invites us to pay more attention to the action of the other, and to understand one group in terms of their relationship with the other.

The hand is here too: Roddy literally writes his way into his homeland's sometimes hidden, sometimes forgotten histories. He unites the cursive with the discursive in the carefully-executed joined-up writing of a schoolroom in order to rediscover the story of the 18th century Scottish radical thinker, and political player, Thomas Muir. As he writes the story of the Protestant Republican Muir for today, Roddy uncovers more of his own story.

The ghost of Thomas Muir haunts Roddy Buchanan's personal history. Roddy went to a school in Glasgow named after Thomas Muir; Muir's former home now acts as the changing rooms where Roddy, as a boy, put on his football kit. Muir was an extraordinary figure, moored in a developing Scottish identity, yet unencumbered by a restrictive sense of nationalism; a friend of Thomas Paine, he was the first foreigner to be given citizenship of France. The cultural mixed-marriage that Muir embodies draws us into Roddy Buchanan's own story, which itself points to the complicatedness that governs all our stories.

For this is not merely a Glaswegian chronicle. Ireland, and Belfast, play their part too. Thomas Muir had Irish parents. On a visit to Belfast, he was named an honorary member of the Society of United Irishmen. Belfast is implicated in every aspect of the exhibition.

In his poem "The Tollund Man" Seamus Heaney dreams of travelling to Jutland, where, "In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home." There is something of that here too. Buchanan's Jekyll-and-Hydeish Scots dualism presses us, in a Belfast gallery, to encounter our own divided self: the mutuality, the implicatedness of a political space dominated still by the interplay of Scots and Irish.

In a new work produced for this exhibition, Roddy Buchanan places an ArmaLite high on a wall, out of reach and thus beyond use. But what is not beyond, and should not be beyond use, is history itself.

One person's history placed in conversation with another's history; history unmasking exaggeration and pretence; history re-casting the political as the personal; history as a mirror reflecting the truth about ourselves and each other; history inviting us to decide which role we will play.