Founded in 1891, Belfast Celtic was a successful club team that disbanded after an ugly and infamous incident on Boxing Day 1948, when a player was attacked and badly beaten by a mob after a game at local rival Linfield Park.
This new play is based on sports journalist Padraig Coyle's book about the club and is co-written by Coyle and actor/comedians Conor Grimes and Alan McKee (who also perform in the six-person cast). Narrated by sportswriter Ossie McKeown (Breffni McKenna), the play is a complex and sometimes confusing set of flashbacks that, in the first act, bounce back and forth between a 1952 exhibition match for which the team briefly reformed; a team tour to New York in 1949; and, eventually, the fateful Boxing Day clash. The production values and acting in this first half are very strong - Conleth White's warm lighting guides the audience's attention; Stuart Marshall's clever set of platforms peopled with multiple life-size photo cut-outs of the cast gives a sense of assembled community; and the strong cast swap roles and costumes skilfully under Dan Gordon's direction. A great deal of information is conveyed, and there are some good laughs in the form of comic routines between Grimes and McKee.
There is not, however, a clear dramatic agenda: one longs throughout the lengthy first act for any new purchase on the material. This appears, welcome but too late, in the second half, which focuses on the culpability of McKeown, who at the urging of others in the press box, sanitised his coverage of the mob scene. Was the demise of Belfast Celtic an inevitability of Northern Ireland's political situation, or the result of a collective lack of will and moral fibre? A complicated question, which the play toys with but never really sets out to answer. Paradise will doubtless be very popular with locals who remember the club, but will not join the annals of great footie plays.
· Until July 3. Box office: 028-9038 1081
