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Sam Thompson (playwright)
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Sam Thompson (playwright)
Sam(uel) Thompson (21 May 1916 – 15 February 1965) was a Northern Irish playwright best known for his controversial plays Over the Bridge, which exposes sectarianism, and Cemented with Love, which focuses on political corruption. His works fall into the social realist genre but are distinct in their dramatisation of Northern Irish issues; they were ground-breaking in documenting sectarian violence before the eruption of the Troubles.
Born and educated in a working-class Protestant area in Ballymacarrett, Belfast, Thompson was the seventh of eight children of a lamp-lighter and part-time sexton of St Clement's Church. He spent most of his working life as a painter in the Belfast shipyards, starting aged 14 at Harland and Wolff and working for Belfast Corporation after the Second World War, and much of his writing draws on these experiences.
Thompson was a lifelong socialist and a committed trades unionist; he became a shop steward at the Belfast Corporation. His opposition to sectarian discrimination was to cost him his job. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament as the Labour party candidate for the rural South Down constituency in 1964.
He married May Thompson in 1947. He suffered a heart attack in June 1961, dying suddenly from a second heart attack in 1965, and is buried in Belfast City Cemetery.
Thompson was encouraged to begin writing for radio in 1955, aged 39, by novelist and radio producer Sam Hanna Bell, who overheard him telling stories of shipyard life in a pub. His first piece, the radio documentary feature Brush in Hand about shipyard apprenticeship, was broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in 1956.
Several radio plays and documentary features for the BBC were to follow. Tommy Baxter, Shopsteward (1957) focuses on discrimination against a trades union official by the management, while The General Foreman (1958) takes on the difficult role of the foreman mediating between management and the workforce. The autobiographical piece The Long Back Street (1959) describes poverty and sectarian violence during Thompson's early life in Ballymacarrett. He became a full-time playwright and actor in 1959.
His later works for radio include the documentary A Bed for the Night in which he interviews inmates of a Belfast hostel for the homeless, and the serial The Fairmans: Life in a Belfast Working Family (1960–61).
The stage play Over the Bridge, Thompson's best-known work, charts the tragic course of a sectarian dispute in the shipyard. Thompson offered the play to James Ellis, then director of the Ulster Group Theatre, early in 1958, reportedly saying "I got a play you wouldn't touch with a bargepole!" Ellis accepted it, and rehearsals had already started for a production in April 1959 when the theatre's board of directors headed by J. Ritchie McKee refused to produce the play, criticising it in the Belfast Telegraph as "full of grossly vicious phrases and situations which would undoubtedly offend and affront every section of the public" and stating "It is the policy of the directors of the Ulster Group Theatre to keep political and religious controversies off our stage." Ellis and many actors of the Ulster Group Theatre resigned to form their own company, and Thompson successfully sued the Board for breach of contract.
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Sam Thompson (playwright)
Sam(uel) Thompson (21 May 1916 – 15 February 1965) was a Northern Irish playwright best known for his controversial plays Over the Bridge, which exposes sectarianism, and Cemented with Love, which focuses on political corruption. His works fall into the social realist genre but are distinct in their dramatisation of Northern Irish issues; they were ground-breaking in documenting sectarian violence before the eruption of the Troubles.
Born and educated in a working-class Protestant area in Ballymacarrett, Belfast, Thompson was the seventh of eight children of a lamp-lighter and part-time sexton of St Clement's Church. He spent most of his working life as a painter in the Belfast shipyards, starting aged 14 at Harland and Wolff and working for Belfast Corporation after the Second World War, and much of his writing draws on these experiences.
Thompson was a lifelong socialist and a committed trades unionist; he became a shop steward at the Belfast Corporation. His opposition to sectarian discrimination was to cost him his job. He stood unsuccessfully for parliament as the Labour party candidate for the rural South Down constituency in 1964.
He married May Thompson in 1947. He suffered a heart attack in June 1961, dying suddenly from a second heart attack in 1965, and is buried in Belfast City Cemetery.
Thompson was encouraged to begin writing for radio in 1955, aged 39, by novelist and radio producer Sam Hanna Bell, who overheard him telling stories of shipyard life in a pub. His first piece, the radio documentary feature Brush in Hand about shipyard apprenticeship, was broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in 1956.
Several radio plays and documentary features for the BBC were to follow. Tommy Baxter, Shopsteward (1957) focuses on discrimination against a trades union official by the management, while The General Foreman (1958) takes on the difficult role of the foreman mediating between management and the workforce. The autobiographical piece The Long Back Street (1959) describes poverty and sectarian violence during Thompson's early life in Ballymacarrett. He became a full-time playwright and actor in 1959.
His later works for radio include the documentary A Bed for the Night in which he interviews inmates of a Belfast hostel for the homeless, and the serial The Fairmans: Life in a Belfast Working Family (1960–61).
The stage play Over the Bridge, Thompson's best-known work, charts the tragic course of a sectarian dispute in the shipyard. Thompson offered the play to James Ellis, then director of the Ulster Group Theatre, early in 1958, reportedly saying "I got a play you wouldn't touch with a bargepole!" Ellis accepted it, and rehearsals had already started for a production in April 1959 when the theatre's board of directors headed by J. Ritchie McKee refused to produce the play, criticising it in the Belfast Telegraph as "full of grossly vicious phrases and situations which would undoubtedly offend and affront every section of the public" and stating "It is the policy of the directors of the Ulster Group Theatre to keep political and religious controversies off our stage." Ellis and many actors of the Ulster Group Theatre resigned to form their own company, and Thompson successfully sued the Board for breach of contract.