The Big Fellah

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin

A charismatic and bluntly persuasive man stands before a moneyed audience and commands financial support for poor, benighted Ireland. We could use a guy like this. It is, however, 1972 in New York and the speaker is the main fundraiser and gunrunner for the IRA in America: David Costello, “the big fellah”. Played with a suave, stealthy menace by Finbar Lynch, he is addressing an audience of Irish American republican sympathisers, played – in a provocative bit of casting – by us.

A brisk history of the Provisional IRA, from 1972 to 2001, as seen from a Bronx safehouse, Richard Bean’s ambitious play moves with the nervy pace and plot pivots of a thriller. Yet it is essentially a drama of perspective: how ideals simplify, harden or splinter with distance. “Your nation is your head,” as Yasmine Akram’s character, Karelma, puts it. Out of Joint and the Lyric Hammersmith’s touring production now brings that imagined nation home to its source.

Bean’s vision of Irish-American identity and illusion is equal parts sensitive and gaudy. Radicalised by Bloody Sunday, a New York fireman, Michael (David Ricardo-Pearce), offers his apartment as a republican haven, which designer Tim Shortall has rendered as an inconspicuous saturation of Shamrock and Kelly greens. Through the decades it changes superficially, but the cause and “the war” mutates.

The escaped Long Kesh prisoner Ruairi (Luke Griffin), for instance, begins as a political pawn, standing trial again in New York as a freedom fighter but gnawed away by conscience, while Costello, nonplussed by the socialism of the “long haired” hunger strikers (defended by a terrific Lisa Kerr as an IRA spy), is later sickened by the Enniskillen bombing and the psychotic violence of David Rintoul’s unnerving enforcer Frank McArdle.

Director Max Stafford-Clark keeps the ideas and personalities in brisk motion with the play’s historical sweep, but plot and character transitions become clunky; a couple of fight scenes are as muddled as Michael’s conflicted Protestant or Ruairi’s sudden leap from stage Irishman (“Arrah, f**k,” he actually says) to a “reggula New Yoika”. This may be the consequence of funnelling complicated issues into a smooth plot formula (there is, of course, an informant in the group). Bean’s comedy can be enjoyably dark – with allusions to Gadafy’s military support for the IRA bringing a chiding piquancy – but it’s often compromising. If there’s one thing Ruairi would change about the IRA, he says at a pivotal moment, “it’s all the f***ing killing”.

Now, that line wouldn’t look out of place in a Martin McDonagh play.

Bean lands other points with merciless precision (“Every dollar buys a bullet,” Costello tells a supporter who would distance himself from violence) but late, heavy-handed comparisons to Islamic extremism and the action’s final drive towards 9/11 are too laboured to seem anything but crass. Instead, the debate narrows into the glib presentation of chickens coming home to roost, as though the play’s perspective too has become simplified, hardened and finally blunted by distance.

Runs until May 7