Writer: Tim Edge
Director: Ben Kavanagh
Tim Edge locates his play in Belfast, just before the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998. The IRA is transitioning from a collection of single-minded hard men to a more complicated, better organised, chillingly efficient organisation, that has a place for women that is more significant than making sandwiches.
There is no glory in Tim Edge’s Belfast, no idealism. Just bombing and murder and betrayal, and a population immersed in terror for three decades, and the only vaguely meaningful action they can contemplate is avenging their loved ones, victims of one of the cycles of destruction that has consumed their lives. No heroes. No black or white, just people designated as traitors and people designated as executioners.
It is a serious play, well-acted by a strong ensemble cast, supported by a striking set design from Ceci Calf, an excellent sound design by the director Ben Kavanagh, and some magnificently deployed lighting designed by Joseph Ed Thomas, emphasising dramatic moments with subtle colour choices and superb use of intensity and shadow. The Arcola has a weirdly shaped playing area and an unmovable iron platform taking up the right hand side of the stage, but director, actors, and technicians made the difficult space work to great dramatic advantage. It’s a pretty bleak two hours in a theatre, but everyone involved is doing excellent work.
The Marquee name on the cast list is Evanna Lynch, and her presentation of the character of Niamh is the heart of the play. Niamh’s anguish at her little brother’s involvement in terrorist activities, her loathing of the morally null paramilitaries, her own problematic activism, give Evanna Lynch a multitude of opportunities to display her considerable talent. Niamh’s descent into a sort of dissociated numbness is chillingly well presented. She is very ably supported by the ensemble, who do a lot of doubling and keep a complicated story admirably clear. Elizabeth Counsell, as Mary O’Brien, is the creepiest granny there ever was, Flora Montgomery has a difficult double, as Niamh’s desperate mother and as the ice-cold commander of an active service unit, and Jordan Walker, amongst a plethora of representations of young men, gets to play an IRA bomb-maker with the most terrifyingly psychotic expert analysis of ‘good’ bomb design. But there isn’t a weak performance anywhere.
It is unusual to hear analysis of The Troubles in Ulster that completely avoids any political analysis. Tim Edge focuses exclusively on the human wreckage left by decades of sectarian violence. It makes the play resonate outside the bounds of that conflict. It’s a hard, cold evening’s entertainment, but the points it makes are important, and it makes them extremely well.
Runs until 25 March 2023
