Reviews

Jane Coyle reviews The Shadow of a Gunman at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast

The Shadow of a Gunman
Lyric Theatre, Belfast

As the twists and turns of the peace process turn everyday life in the North ever more surreal and unpredictable, one approaches the Lyric's revival of the first play of O'Casey's Dublin trilogy with a degree of anticipation and expectation that what is happening on the streets may in some way be reflected onto the stage.

Director Fiona Buffini had declared her belief that the mark of a great play is its ability to speak for the times that are in its latest production.

Yet, for all that it is sensitively and clearly delivered, this is a traditional reading, which does not venture far beyond a faithful portrait of the turbulence and poverty of tenement life in 1920s Dublin and the individual human and political tragedies contained in it.

Although it is part of of a great trilogy, The Shadow of the Gunman is not itself a great play, with the most obvious of its many structural problems emerging in the final off-stage scenes of frantic activity.

Eleanor Methven, Gerard Jordan, BJ Hogg and Frankie McCafferty stay close to the spirit and humour of O'Casey, pulling every trick out of the book in their brief appearances as the all-knowing Julia Henderson, the long-winded James Gallogher, the hard-drinking Orangeman Adlophus Grigson and the loud-mouthed wannabe republican Tommy Owens.

Karl Shiels endows the philosopher-huckster Seumas Shields with a rumpled charm and oodles of blarney, acquired over years of selling hairpins to widows. Through Carol Betera's steamy, nicotine-stained set, one gets a real sense of the claustrophobia and squalor of the small room he shares with Michael Patric's would-be poet Donal Davoren.

There are moments when his low-key delivery comes close to the core of the frustrated scribbler, who is widely assumed to be a gunman on the run. But by the time those final rip-roaring scenes of murder and mayhem descend, he seems trapped by his own passivity and paralysed in his response to the terrible fate of Minnie Powell (Marcella Plunkett).

This workmanlike production does not make any dreadful blunders, but nor does it register any real depths of emotion. Surreal and unpredictable it certainly is not.

• Runs until February 26th