On an island that is meant to be engaged in a process of peace and reconciliation, Michael Duke makes a brave and dramatically potent choice by writing a play about a man who has no interest in forgiveness.
Several years previously, a young couple were the victims of a random terror bombing days before their wedding. Mae died but David lived, maimed by his injuries. Now David has chosen a new bride - a therapist who helped him recover - but David's father is strongly opposed to the match. The night before the wedding, he writes out place cards for all the dead people the family know who won't be attending.
It is also Hallowe'en, and the family are visited by an angel of death, who grants the father the dream he has so stubbornly held on to: the second act becomes David and Mae's wedding party. But an unwanted visitor - the bomber who killed Mae - also arrives, and the father is forced to choose between a future filled with more violence or an acceptance of past events he cannot change.
This is an emotionally and politically powerful play that asks important, uncomfortable questions. Its scale is ambitious: 14 speaking roles plus a chorus of non-speaking performers representing the dead. This is made even more challenging by Duke's writing style: most characters speak in short, direct, expository phrases, intercut with the occasional flashback monologue. Everything is on the surface; there is little subtext.
Straight naturalism was never the right mode in which to perform Revenge - but it is never clear what style director Anna Newell has chosen for her Tinderbox Theatre Company production. In the first act, the performers deliver lines with their arms by their sides, straining to convey the powerful feeling behind their words. A constant overlay of recorded instrumental music by Neil Martin was perhaps intended to add the missing emotion, but instead delivers only melodrama. The second act builds to a moment of great power, as the bombing is relived, but throughout, the production's clunkiness undermines the play's seriousness and poetry.
· At Warrenpoint Town Hall on Monday. Box office: 028-3031 3180. Then touring.
