Gerry Moynihan’s debut play begins in a bustling Northern Irish pub; a group of men are bantering, buying pints and eyeing up the talent. Pádraig, the central character, is loud and swaggering, conjuring up the blokeish conviviality of this pub posse.
But as benign as they seem, this group of dissident Irish republicans are violently committed to an “unfinished revolution”. The opening scene ends with a kiss outside the pub for Pádraig, but even romance becomes a threat to his single-minded focus on “the cause” that defines his life and leaves him inextricably yoked to his comrades.
This short, magnetising play was performed in 2017 at the Finborough in London and has been made available online in lockdown. While Jez Butterworth and Martin McDonagh have dramatised the Troubles in compelling ways, this is a far leaner study of Irish republican terror in which the personal tragedy of a zealot is brought to life.
Paul Kennedy as Pádraig gives a magnificently elastic performance, narrating the story and falling into a host of characterisations. The monologue takes place on a static set – a room covered in dust sheets that only makes sense in the play’s final moments – and with a chair as its single prop. Yet it feels dynamic and textured throughout, under the clever direction of Shane Dempsey and with tension-building music by Anna Clock. Scenes change from violent beatings to pub quiz nights and Kennedy is adept at making the switches, mournful one minute and oozing testosterone-filled fury the next.
The mechanics of violent fanaticism are unpicked in Moynihan’s fine writing, from the gang’s gleeful and almost boyish machismo to their tunnel-vision adherence to a belief in the “purity” of their struggle. Pádraig talks of being a “true inheritor” of the cause, in a “direct line of descent to those whose blood was spilt in [the Easter Rising of] 1916”.
But there is also the moral policing of their neighbourhood which amounts to group thuggery. The men define themselves as freedom fighters, even though they resemble the mafia-like men from a Lisa McInerney novel, and when Pádraig questions their actions he finds out that there is no room for contesting the unyielding and indiscriminate violence meted out in the name of freedom.
His tragic fall also shows how deeply and ineluctably the tentacles of this violence have reached through the generations. “People like me don’t run away, can’t run away,” he says, and his ongoing struggle seems akin to the intergenerational grudges and revenge cycles of one of Lorca’s blood feuds.
It is utterly gripping drama – political, personal and perceptive, with a strong sense of story. It is just let down by the quality of the recording, which is intermittently grainy, dark and out of focus. Its poor filming is an argument in itself for the funding of high-quality archive material that captures fine new talent such as this.
Available online until 31 December.
