The Speckled People

Gate Theatre ***

DRESSED IN lederhosen and an Aran jumper, is it any wonder that young Hanni is confused, trapped as he is between the heritage of his German mother and her shadowy history and his father’s dogmatic grá for Irish culture? It is not just the past that is a foreign country, but the Dublin seaside suburb outside the front door, where everyone speaks a language full of untranslatable words: English.

Hanni, played with wide-eyed childish innocence by Tadhg Murphy, is too young to understand the dangers posed within and without of his own four walls – (“when you are small you know nothing“) – and is forced instead to watch the world with an outsider’s objectivity. As he witnesses his mother’s isolation, his father’s rage, and his parents’ struggle to make ends meet, Hanni is fully aware that he is powerless to intervene.

In this stage adaptation of his 2003 book, Hugo Hamilton skilfully juxtaposes episodic memory monologues and dialogue scenes in the service of a fluent dramatic arc. Borrowing the central theatrical device from Brian Friel's Translations, Hamilton paints a world of linguistic confusion and misunderstanding; if language is your home, as Hanni posits, "one day you might wake up and forget which country you are living in".

This liminal psychological ambiguity is harnessed by Joe Vanek’s set, which blends childhood playfulness with 1950s style, while Davy Cunningham’s lighting design illuminates the transitions between spaces and time periods with atmospheric clarity.

However, the careful observations of Hamilton's memoir lose much of their subtlety in the book's translation to the stage. The father figure, Seán (Denis Conway), in particular suffers, playing pantomime villain to mother Irmgard's (Julika Jenkin's) indulgence. As a fervent Irish nationalist, Seán becomes an outrageous figure of fun, and, in director Patrick Mason's vision, he serves as a comic foil to Irmgard and her harrowing experiences of war-time Germany. As a result, the sudden ending of The Speckled Peopleis made considerably less poignant; a case of just desserts rather than tragedy.

And yet the audience’s laughter at Seán’s Republican passions becomes an important, if uncanny, confirmation of how Irish values have changed in the intervening years. The complex plurality of Irish identity that Hamilton’s memoir explored seems sidelined in service of self-congratulation: a sort of “look how far we’ve come” smugness that neglects deeper questions of repressed psychology for an easy sentimental end.

Runs until November 5th