Football has been a gift to Irish playwrights in recent decades, with the snakes-and-ladders fortunes of the Irish soccer team providing ready-made melodrama. Metaphors of the national psyche have attached themselves to the game in a theatrical subgenre established, in part, by Dermot Bolger with his 1990 state-of-the-nation play, In High Germany. Twenty years later, he has revisited the central character, keeping football as the shaping force.
World Cup qualifying matches are more than a punctuation device for this one-man show: they give meaning to the life of Eoin and his two best friends who wholly identify with the Irish team. Now in his late 40s, Eoin meditates on his childhood, his exile in Hamburg, his homecoming to a city transformed by the boom and now dramatically returned to recession. The commentary on social and economic change becomes too direct at times, but for the most part, the layers of Bolger's text balance the polemical with the personal, skirting sentimentality.
Ray Yeates's versatile performance carries the audience with him, as Eoin reels from disorientation, loss and grief. Playing a range of characters, including his German wife and son, Yeates brings a manic energy to football fandom.
Whether defeat on the pitch at "the hand of Thierry Henry" last November returned Ireland to comfortable victimhood, or signified a liberation from the Celtic Tiger's rhetoric of success, for Eoin the match marks "half-time" in his life, a point of self-renewal. He moves on, not with a "parting glass", but a toast to whatever is to come.
