Throughout her plays, Christina Reid explores the lives of women in Belfastand successfully offers a bold interrogation of other facets of Belfast history from aProtestant women’s perspective. Reid’s examination of the politics, entrenched inthe private and public lives of Northern Irish women, is the central focus of TheBelle of the Belfast City. In the play, the current political unrest in NorthernIreland is set in relation to sexual and racial minorities, which in turn, are enforcedby the misogyny embedded in sectarian violence and religious dogmatism. Farfrom simplifying these questions, Reid takes extra care to show how the familial,social and political facets are all connected to the perpetuation of the prejudicesurrounding idea of the Other and the nation. In addition to this, this play alsocombines the experience of exile in relationship to gender and sectarian violencethrough the stories of Belle, Dolly’s half-black granddaughter. As a narrator andinheritor of the matrilineal heritage, Belle by her existence raises questions about thenational and racial categorizations of politics.
In this play, while male authority uses the female body to marginalize andexploit it, Reid successfully turns the victimized female body into a site ofresistance and subversion of that authority. In addition to the family photographs,the songs and dances that are performed through the medium of the female bodyare unmistakably subversive. While the female voice and body within Jack’s ideaof nation are objects of repression and silence, however, the women’s bodies andvoices are freed and released in the ritual of female bonding that celebrates thesubversive potential of the feminine body. With these theatrical devices, Reidcarefully depicts and subverts the portraits of women whose roles and images havebeen imagined in the discourse of conflict-ridden Belfast.