Review

A review Defender of the Faith at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin

Defender of the Faith

Peacock Theatre, Dublin

Helen Meany

One of the most unsettling moments in Stuart Carolan's new play comes when Joe, a farmer from South Armagh, describes the suicide of his teenage son Shamey as natural - "like culling a herd of cattle". Talking about animals - dogs on the scent, squealing pigs - becomes an oblique way of referring to what dominates this family's life: secret IRA activities, bomb attacks, shootings, murders of informers.

In the mid-1980s, with the hunger strikes a still potent memory, Joe (Gerard McSorley) a life-long Republican paramilitary, invites an IRA intelligence man, JJ (Frank McCusker), to his farm to investigate whether an informer is at work in their group, which also includes his son Thomas (Laurence Kinlan).

Joe's brutally aggressive, expletive-ridden language is already rubbing off on his youngest boy, Danny (Shane Murray Corcoran), despite Thomas's attempts to protect him. Only JJ (played with silken menace by McCusker) is articulate, but the language he uses is distorted and debased, as is the reiteration of the word "trust" in a secret meeting between Barney, the farmhand (Tom Hickey) and an anonymous figure (Lalor Roddy).

The constant Border patrols by helicopters and pervasive sense of surveillance are conveyed by Cormac Caroll's soundscape and the corrugated iron panels of Dick Bird's set. Framing the claustrophobic domestic interior, these suggest the barricaded facades of Border checkpoints and RUC stations, as well as the farm buildings where violent punishments are meted out.

Fear and dread are emphasised by Wilson Milam's production, heightened by the repeated fading to black between scenes, and the shadows in which the punishment beating is enacted, with only the cigarette tip of one of the gunmen visible.

Some familiar dramatic themes - the catalytic effect of a stranger's arrival, bitter father-son conflict, the loss of a mother - are given a dark twist by Carolan, emphasising the way family relationships are poisoned by the atmosphere of secrecy and threat. Thomas's grief for his psychiatrically ill mother and dead brother Shamey is inextricable from the violence he and his father are caught up in, and have been moulded by.

While it is set almost two decades ago, the painful repercussions of all this are still with us in the current incidence of emotional breakdown, youthful male suicide, paramilitary intimidation.

Memorably realised by these strong performances, this is a significant debut from a writer whose dramatic voice is poised between anger and compassion.