Crossing the Line

Crossing The Line When the factory opened in 1981, hopes were high that John Delorean?s revolutionary gull-wing the sports car would create a much needed industry boost for Northern Ireland, the troubled province being the centre of a new and ever more violent breakout of The Troubles. The 660,000 square foot site chosen by DeLorean on which to purpose build his factory sat in a bog on the outskirts of the troubled towns of Dunmurry and Twinbrook. Building began in October 1978 and was completed only 16 months later. Hundreds of workers were employed there as the government offered John DeLorean financial incentives to build his dream car on the outskirts of Belfast and the resulting gull-wing sports car the maverick manufacturer and designer chose to build there on British taxpayers? money became both famous as well as notorious, the sports car appearing in movies, video games, and television shows and was immortalised in the cult movie Back to The Future - despite the terrible and troubled history of the company that built it. Manufacture of the DeLorean car started in 1981, but fewer than 9,000 cars were produced for the American market but these cars were so badly designed and built that the company collapsed a year after the plant had been opened. Seven of the men who helped build this car signed their names on one of the last gull wing doors made under the inscription ?The end of a dream - or is it?' - seemingly in the faint hope that despite the Troubles in Northern Ireland there might still be hope for a better and more settled future, a future they had initially been assured would not only benefit them, but their families, community and their country. Most remarkably, since the closure of Harland and Woolf, the great shipyard in Belfast, this was the first time Catholics and Protestants had worked side by side in the North or Ireland, which they did peacefully and amicably - until the fateful moment that Bobby Sands died as a result of his hunger strike and with his death came a fresh and terrible outbreak of violence and with it an end to the hopes and dreams of the work force. This play tells that story through the eyes of the workers, the owners and the management of the factory, and the British who saw a chance to take political advantage of the troubled province. It is also a modern day Romeo and Juliet story for at its heart lies the doomed and blighted romance of a young Catholic girl and her Protestant boy-friend.