Fringe Theatre Reviews - Quietly – Traverse Theatre – Four stars / Grounded – Traverse Theatre – four stars / Fight Night – Traverse Theatre – four stars / Have I No Mouth – Traverse Theatre – four stars
Two men seek closure in a late night Belfast bar in Quietly, Owen McCafferty's new play presented by Dublin's Abbey Theatre in Jimmy Fay's firecracker of a production. Robert the Polish bar-man is watching the Poland/Northern Ireland match when Jimmy arrives, full of pent-up rage and gallows humour. When Ian arrives, things threaten to explode into violence, but quickly subside as the pair attempt to purge themselves of what happened almost forty years earlier, when sectarian violence in Belfast was at its bloody height. What follows is, as Jimmy observes, a more intimate and less formal take on a truth and reconciliation committee, as the pair unravel the history that binds them. It's a devastating little power play that sums up a battle-scarred nation's collective psyche in miniature, with the football game on television pointing to pointing up the lingering tribalism even more. Fay's production, played out in a working bar-room, is blessed by