Judas of the Gallarus
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
Rating: **
Even with a firm handle on Irish history, you can often find yourself lost in actor- playwright Donal O'Kelly's quasi-fantastical new play, which plants itself in the murderous, dying days of the Irish civil war (1922-3) after the assassination of Michael Collins. Even now, many events of that time are disputed, and no more so than in West Kerry, where the play is set.
O'Kelly's centrepiece is a minor but colourful historical figure, Jock McPeake. A Scot who fought with the Irish Free State Army during the civil war, McPeake was the machine gunner in the IRA ambush which killed Collins. McPeake bizarrely deserted to the IRA shortly afterwards, taking with him an armoured car - antics believed to have had less to do with ideology than with his reputation as a wild card and ladies' man.
O'Kelly has written much of the play in verse, with trailing ribbons of free association. His Jock is a wild, insouciant, Glaswegian fugitive in a girl's blouse, who stumbles west, escorted by a local IRA man called Duv. The action is played out around a gallarus - a replica of a famous, early Christian dry-stone oratory - built by a shamanical loon with a Belfast accent called Paddo, costumed as a Moses/ St Patrick figure or an H-block blanket protester, depending on your perspective.
After Paddo and Duv melt off into the night, Jock quickly seduces an adventurous local girl, narrowly escaping discovery by her gormless husband. With the countryside rife with rumour thanks to the brutal army manhunt, Jock is tarred as Collins's assassin.
The girl dumps him and even Duv returns to execute him as a British spy, despite a ceasefire. But in a long and meandering final scene, Duv and Jock resolve their differ ences under the stars. It all wanders everywhere and nowhere, and despite some vivid performances from Paschal Friel (Jock), Denis Conway (Duv) and Karen Ardiff (Noreen), director Jason Byrne does not impose any great meaning on the piece.
With the strain of leftwing, humanitarian concerns in his work, maybe O'Kelly is trying to get at the moral perversities of war through a verbose, comic-poetic riff on some pretty sore history. But given the tragic enormity of such, it is difficult to know what this coy comedy connects to - other than O'Kelly's itch for language and obscure madness.
Till September 18. Box office: 00 353 1 878 7222.
