REVIEW: BEHIND CLOSED WALLS by Daryl J Blair at Jack Studio Theatre until 29 October 2022

‘A commendable reminder of a subject too many UK citizens forget has much to do with them’ ★★★

We rather like, on this side of the water, to assume that Northern Ireland’s sorted now, that the Troubles are a thing of the unhappy past. But, in a week when the Northern Ireland Assembly faces new elections after months of stalemate, Daryl J Blair’s short, intense play is a reminder that all is not sorted yet.

Behind Closed Walls finds a Brit with a posh English accent wearing army fatigues tied to a chair in a small back room with a bag over his head and a Real IRA man ready to interrogate him, the two parts played by Blair himself and Tiernan Mullane. 

We’re in a nearish future when it’s all gone wrong again, and the Second Troubles are under way. The Brit, he says, has come seeking a means to peace, the Northern Ireland man, long burned by British promises and indifference fears otherwise. Over the course of its tight hour’s running time, and as is the way of these things, the two men will find as much in common as divides them, not least, spoiler alert, because they’ll realise they knew each other years ago as kids and friends.
 

It is, as so often at the Jack, an artful set, a black box adorned with a couple of pool cues here, a couple of shovels there, reminders that violence comes in more forms than guns and bombs. 

The script’s uneven – lurches into polemic and historical exposition, over-rapid switches from friendliness to hatred – but often sharp on the personal relationship at its centre, with questions of friendship and identity, how it is formed, the assumptions we make about other people. And there are points of implausibility – no-one, no matter how dumb, would walk down the Falls Road in British Army fatigues, and especially an apparently posh Brit who was actually born in Belfast.

The two friends’ failure to recognise each other also stretches credulity a bit (if they’d kept the hood and the balaclava on longer, or one of them had twigged before the other …..). The timelines are also odd – we’re in the future, but the set-up and conversation feel very much like many previous and deep Troubles dramas, with visual echoes of the Crying Game’s opening sequences, spiritual echoes of Bernard Maclaverty’s Cal or Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City, and even a hint of Branagh’s recent Belfast lurking in the memory.

Which said, the play is intense and with an instant and simultaneously ageless conflict built in between the big country and the small, the dominant culture and the oppressed one, the careless ignorance of Britain against the bitter knowledge and memory of all of Ireland. We never quite believe that one of these men will end up killing the other, and are left literally in the dark on that one at the end.

But it’s brief, sharp on the need to break a long, long cycle of violence and the difficulty of doing so, and a commendable reminder of a subject too many UK citizens forget has much to do with them.

Photographer credit is Max Curtis

BEHIND CLOSED WALLS by Daryl J Blair

Directed by Daryl J Blair and Phoebe Cresswell

Presented by Name of Production Company

Jack Studio Theatre, Brockley    25 to 29 October 2022

Box Office: www.brockleyjack.co.uk/0333 666 3366

Reviewer: David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, Joy Goun award, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.