The Big Fellah

Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Previews Apr 19-20 Opens Apr 21-May 7 7.30pm From 15 gaietytheatre.ie 01-6771717

How should theatre deal with the IRA? It's a sensitive question, to which many playwrights have responded with a sense of distance. In recent years Irish dramas have either wrapped family tragedy with unspecified allusions to nationalist paramilitarism (Stuart Carolan's Defender of the Faith) or sniggered with gallows humour at the Troubles (Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Rosemary Jenkinson's The Bonefire).

Here, though, provocative British playwright Richard Bean uses the distance of comedy and geography to lay out a brief history of the Provisional IRA as witnessed by peripheral characters. Set in New York and beginning with the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, it finds a New York fireman recruited by the godfather of the US wing of the Provos, “The Big Fellah” (Finbar Lynch), to provide his Bronx home as a safe house for an escaped IRA man.

Continuing through three decades of turbulence, The Big Fellahuses black humour and political insight to show a cause stretched and manipulated between thugs and idealists. Max Stafford-Clark, no stranger to Ireland or Irish subjects, directs Out of Joint and the Lyric Hammersmith's well- received and unsentimental co-production, where comic edge and dislocation supply a fresh angle to bring some political truths closer to home.

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