N. Ireland scribe goes into hiding
Mitchell on the run since attack on his home
On the night of Nov. 23, masked men with baseball bats gas-bombed Mitchell's car, and the family fled the house in fear. Mitchell and his brood are now renting a house in an undisclosed location but have given interviews to major Irish and British papers describing their ordeal.
Mitchell believes the attacks were carried out by loyalist paramilitaries who felt threatened and exposed by the issues that his plays dramatize.
After having several plays produced in Belfast in the early 1990s, Mitchell started to make theatrical waves in 1998 with Dublin's Abbey Theater production of "As the Beast Sleeps," which dramatized the struggle of members of the paramilitary Ulster Defense Assn. (UDA) to adjust to the Northern Ireland peace process.
He soon became one of the most talked-about new talents in Britain and Ireland, won several major awards with plays including "Trust," which treated collusion between paramilitaries and the British Army, and "The Force of Change," about policing, and was named playwright in residence at the Royal Court Theater in London.
At the same time, he continued to live in the huge Rathcoole housing estate in north Belfast despite police warnings that he was on a death list because of local resentment of the way he depicted the community -- Rathcoole is well known to be a UDA stronghold.
He subsequently moved out of the area several years ago to the middle-class suburb of Glengormley following his marriage; he and his wife, Alison, have a 7-year-old son.
It was a BBC television film of "As the Beast Sleeps" in 2002 that started to raise the temperature on Mitchell's situation; his parents, who had lived in Rathcoole for 50 years, were forced out of the area earlier this year and now live with Mitchell and his family.
Mitchell finds it ironic that his house was attacked by men wearing scarves associating themselves with the Protestant side of a long-seething Northern Ireland football feud, even as he and his father sat inside watching a match on television and supporting the same team as his attackers.
He told the Irish Times that the men who continue to intimidate him "aren't real Protestants." His wife believes the men were jealous of Mitchell's accomplishments.
Defiantly, Mitchell says he intends to keep writing plays: "My weapons are my words," he has said.
A group of some 30 Northern Irish writers, led by the novelist Glenn Patterson, has signed a letter of protest against Mitchell's treatment.
