Over the Bridge

Waterfront Hall, Belfast

Sam Thompson’s

Over the Bridge

occupies an iconic place in the North’s theatrical history. Spurned by the board of the old Group Theatre because of its controversial content, it took the determination of a group of actors, led by the theatre’s director James Ellis, to form a new company and bring it triumphantly to the stage.

Martin Lynch, regarded by many of Thompson’s former associates as his natural heir, has been authorised to take on the first reworking of the play in celebration of the 50th anniversary of its production.

The result is something of a revelation, thanks in no small measure to Rachel O’Riordan’s atmospheric production, handsomely designed by Stuart Marshall, which seats the audience plum in the centre of the sights and sounds and seething daily activity of the Harland Woolf shipyard in its 1950s heyday. And what a cast has gathered to deliver this dramatic account of sectarianism, intimidation and mob rule in the cauldron of Belfast’s industrial heartland.

Frankie McCafferty is Rabbie White, an old-style trade unionist, brandishing the rule book at every opportunity and regularly falling foul of Richard Clements’s shop steward Warren Baxter, one of the growing band of young Turks in the movement. Matthew McElhinney is the irrepressible apprentice Ephraim Smart, a Buddy Holly wannabe who comes under threat for filling the tea cans of Catholic workers; Tony Flynn is the ramrod-straight head foreman Mr Fox; Lalor Roddy the hard-working but undervalued George Mitchell; and Walter McMonagle his brother Davy, the highly principled convenor and the only one brave or foolish enough to stand firm with his Catholic colleague Peter O’Boyle.

Fair-minded Protestant men all, they struggle to protect O’Boyle and to square the closed-shop policy when Billy Morgan (Michael Liebmann) discloses that his new-found religious beliefs compel him to resign from the union.

Lynch’s muscular text sticks close to the word-heavy original but adds a touch of background colour and contemporary relevance to the terrifying central episode, in which O’Boyle (a steely Billy Carter), the victim of rumours about his assumed support for the IRA Border campaign, falls prey to a baying mob of loyalist thugs. The visual impression of grim-faced, flat-capped working men grappling with union rule, personal loyalties, political convictions and family ties will live long in the memory. Until April 3