Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four stars
How do you escape from a hand-me-down legacy that both shaped you and tore you apart? This question is at the heart of David Ireland’s Belfast set play, which first exploded on to the stage in 2016, and has reverberated across the world ever since.
This Scottish premiere sees David Hayman play Eric, an unreconstructed Loyalist, whose entire being is defined by the Northern Irish Troubles of the previous decades. The uneasy peace that followed looks even more fragile in the years since the play first appeared.
The birth of a granddaughter should bring as much joy to Eric as it does for his wife Bernie and daughter Julie. Eric’s belief that the five-week-old baby is former president of Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams, however, suggests a mid-life crisis in extremis.
As Eric is interrogated by psychiatrist Bridget, he is revealed as a man out of time, unable to cope with anyone he sees as different to himself. Goaded on by Shaun Blaney’s masked gunman Slim, who seems to have escaped from Eric’s past, the crossfire that follows is a last desperate gasp of a man with little to believe in anymore.
There is an increasing darkness to Andy Arnold’s production, the extremes of which are made all the more troubling by its matter-of-fact depiction of the long-term side effects a violent past has on the collective psyche.
The voices of reason may be provided by the women in the room - be it Saskia Ashdown’s ice-cool Bridget, Ann Louise Ross’s long suffering Bernie, or Sinead Sharkey’s pragmatic Julie - but these aren’t enough to quell the mania.
As Eric, Hayman conveys all the broken befuddlement of a man unable to face up to the failings of the ideology that drives him. If there are casualties along the way, so be it, in this powerful and still troubling work that takes no prisoners.
The Herald, March 6th 2023
Ends
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