BWW Reviews: New Abbey Play Offers Complex Legacies of The Troubles

Inside a bedsit gloom as a concrete tunnel, a decommissioned IRA soldier sits on his couch, wrapped in a duvet. You wouldn't suspect Nig (Lalor Roddy) to be a free man, instead resembling one of the 'blanket men' prisoners of the 1970s who protested their designation from special detainees to ordinary convicts. He may have escaped arrest but his descent after Northern Ireland's peace process has threatened his relevance. Has all his work been in vain?

"Don't call me that no more" says Nig to his old colleague Wee Joe (David Pearse), "it's racialist. You call me 'Aff'. For 'African American".

"Really? Aff?"

"No. You dick".

It's an exchange that demonstrates not only an extremist's awareness of an impeding culture of tolerance, but also playwright Jimmy McAleavey's killer one-two that serves up a serious idea in one hand and then swipes you with a joke in the other.

Directed with good pace by Caitríona Mc Laughlin for the Abbey Theatre, McAleavey's play is at its best when meditating on the complex legacies of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. "Come on, then!" yells Nig, expecting a ghost to come out of the darkness. Fear fills the sparkly eyes of the willowy Roddy, bestowing to us a figure undoubtedly haunted. The return to action for him and Wee Joe (well underscored by the comic Pearse to convey an unease) is to assure their past actions have been meaningful. Meanwhile, a superficial subplot involving a mysterious operative played by Steve Blount could have been left on the writing room floor.

There is the more complicated issue then of the new generation of radical. "The Troubles, they must have been a f-ing laugh" comments L, a young recruit to Wee Joe's bomb-making mission, violently vibrating and compelling in Ryan McParland's performance. The playwright may play up the generational differences - the older men's ballad-singing of Blondie's Heart of Glass countered by the aggressive beats of the younger man's homemade rap - but on closer inspection, L is just as numb and disintegrating.

It may not be accidental that the Abbey debuts this new play on the Peacock stage at the same time that Seán O'Casey's The Shadow of a Gunman runs on the main stage. That co-production with Belfast's Lyric Theatre cranks up O'Casey's irreverence of Irish republicanism, a critique that has its source in the highjacking of the left-leaning labour movement around the time of the 1916 Easter Rising. Similarly, McAleavey's soldiers lament the abandoning of socialist ideals. When side-by-side, we see these war politics finding new forms.

It's unfortunate then that a preference for comedy seems to hinder the greater dialogue that's happening. The script delivers memorable jokes - making reference to a "discontinuity IRA"; a blow-up doll called Cathleen ní Silicon - but they feed into a plot that becomes increasingly loopy and carried away as it progresses. The final beat seals its fate as a thriller thinner than a drama that once looked promising: to build these post-war legacies towards something powerful.

Monsters, Dinosaurs, Ghosts runs at the Peacock Stage of the Abbey Theatre until 27 June. For more information and tickets see abbeytheatre.ie. Photo: Ros Kavanagh.

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