One of the many boons of Edinburgh is the chance to check in with the work of the other national theatre companies of Britain and Ireland. The Abbey Theatre in Dublin is the producer of this slow-burn hard-hitter by former Evening Standard Award winner Owen McCafferty, set in a Belfast pub and quietly eloquent about the tentative state of Northern Ireland today.
In an empty bar room, Robert the Polish barman (Robert Zawadzki) is intent on watching a football match on television. Jimmy (Patrick O’Kane), the epitome of laconic world-weariness, comes in and there’s some bone-dry humour in the banter between the two. Jimmy says he’s expecting someone else. There might be aggro. In walks Ian (Declan Conlon), completing the trio of characters. Jimmy headbutts him and slowly, painfully, we start to unpick the details of a terrible event that involved them both in this very pub some 36 years previously.
It would be wrong to reveal more, but given that this is Belfast there is, unfortunately, going to be a past simmering with sectarian tension. Yet this is the present, says McCafferty, they do things differently there and as Jimmy’s fury gradually melts into something less noisy and infinitely more sad, we glimpse a very personal take on truth and reconciliation.
There’s a rare and noteworthy quality of stillness to Jimmy Fay’s production. Zawadzki, who is verbally absent for much of the duration, nonetheless maintains a solidly sustained presence behind the bar. O’Kane and Conlon provide a gripping match-up of damaged opposites; the former pulses with so much coiled rage that he looks as though he’ll self-detonate and the latter speaks in a tone so unvaryingly measured it’s as if he has no emotion left.
Until August 25 (0131 228 1404, traverse.co.uk)
