Alex Coupe is Lecturer in Theatre and Drama Studies at the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on the politics of theatre, live art and dance in Ireland, with an emphasis on gender, conflict transformation and cultural policy. His book, The Gender Politics of Contemporary Performance in Northern Ireland was published in 2024 by Palgrave MacMillan. He is also co-founder and editor of The Art of Reconciliation, an archive of arts-based peacebuilding (www.afr-database.org). His current project, Hibernology After Empire, looks at the role of Ireland in the English literary imagination after the Second World War.

In 1978 the BBC delayed the broadcast of Caryl Churchill’s only documentary play for television, The Legion Hall Bombing, because it risked ‘inflaming tensions’ in Northern Ireland. Scheduled as part of the Play for Today series, it dramatised the juryless ‘Diplock’ trial of Willie Gallagher who had been sentenced to twelve years in prison for bombing the British Legion Hall in Strabane in 1975. Based upon an edited transcript of the trial, the play was designed to provoke debate around what Churchill called the ‘extraordinary’ circumstances of Gallagher’s conviction and the flimsy evidence upon which it rested. But after the BBC substantially edited sections of voiceover commentary in the script, the public discussion turned to BBC censorship and the relationship between ‘impartiality’ and ‘politically committed drama’. Churchill and the play’s producer, Roland Joffé, removed their names from the play’s credits when it was eventually broadcast.

Though largely overlooked, The Legion Hall Bombing is remembered as a test case for the limits of documentary plays at the BBC. However, this paper will draw on material from the BBC’s archives to show how the play illuminates the challenges faced by writers who made work that departed from the established dramatic conventions of ‘Troubles’ drama. The BBC’s heavy-handed response to the play stemmed, at least in part, from its depiction of Britain’s involvement as a protagonist, rather than an ‘impartial’ arbiter, in the ‘Troubles’. Understood as part of Churchill’s 1970s engagement with the historical roots of the British state (Light Shining in Buckinghamshire) and the ongoing legacies of the Empire (Cloud 9), The Legion Hall Bombing marks a rare attempt to use documentary drama to raise questions about the coloniality of Britain’s administration of the North.