Robert Zawadski, left, and Patrick O’Kane in “Quietly.” PHOTO BY JAMES HIGGINS
By Orla O’Sullivan
Contrary to its name, “Quietly,” just opened at the Irish Repertory Theatre, is like a tightly packed explosive.
The audience knows it is certain to detonate from the moment a man walks into a bar. No laughing here. There is just one other customer, a man he has not seen in decades, yet their lives have been bound together in a destructive spiral since.
That was 36 years ago, during the Troubles, when each was just 16. Without the benefit of the press release the average theatregoer might not be quite sure what’s going on.
In that, they might be like the Polish barman, forced to walk uncertain ground, which adds to the suspense of this short, 75-minute journey.
Robert (Robert Zawadzki) arrived in Northern Ireland with his Belfast-born wife long after sectarian paramilitaries disarmed, and he repeatedly walks into a conversational minefield by not knowing what it was like in the bad days.
It used be that nobody wanted to come to Belfast, his sole customer tells him. “When I grew up, the only foreigners who moved here were British soldiers,” says Jimmy (Patrick O’Kane).
Although the infighting has subsided, tribalism endures. “We’re not very good with foreigners,” Jimmy adds with an edge, despite his obviously familiar and largely friendly relationship with Robert.
There is talk of thugs targeting Polish people elsewhere in the city that night because Poland is playing Northern Ireland in soccer.
“You’re okay, ‘cos I’m here,” adds the native, turning his sharp-featured, bald head towards his server, the swing of his broad shoulders and growl of his voice, full of menace.
Shortly afterwards, Jimmy adds – almost casually – that he is expecting someone and “there might be a bit of shouting.”
There is in no doubt is that something is going to detonate when Ian (Declan Conlon) walks into Jimmy’s local at the appointed hour. Your breath catches, subjected to Jimmy Fay’s perfectly controlled direction, and still you do not anticipate a shocking, immediate incident to ensure your attention remains fixed as the backstory is revealed.
Besides, where can you go? You’re like the barman, trapped behind the bar. Or like an ordinary person caught in a warzone, playwright Own McCafferty may be saying.
The play is scattered with poetic allusions, the soccer game as analogy for marauding, male mobs chief among them.
Why do Irish men drink Harp when it tastes so bad the Polish barman asks the two antagonists, as they share in a pint of the same, symbolic lager. It’s his first attempt to diffuse the situation. After his second – making small talk about the match blaring on the television – he is told in no uncertain terms to just watch the game. And so he does, feigning being a fly on the wall, attempting not to get involved…
The play, part of the program to commemorate the 1916 Rising, is a production of Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, brought to New York in association with the Public Theatre.
To say much more would spoil the tale of a soiled yet more innocent time, when Jimmy’s father would carry the family TV to that same local because “bars didn’t have TVs then.”
McCafferty’s setting is so particular and yet the themes of his 2011 play so universal and more relevant today with so much talk of what forms a terrorist. Ian’s story echoes real-life ones of accidental terrorists that one hears, in his case losing his father at 13 and left wanting a male club to which he could belong.
The excellent Conlon, the actor who plays Ian, is a familiar face to anyone who has spent much time in Ireland. O’Kane, who has worked more in Britain, is even more outstanding. Fay, executive producer at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, provided sure direction.
There was no Hollywood-styled neat ending for McCafferty. Rather, he sustained the tension to the end, through to an offhand letdown by Robert, who revealed himself to be just as tribal, and as base, as the rest of men, McCafferty suggests, in a damning, final judgment on his sex.
We can only hope to see at the Rep in future McCafferty’s companion play to this one, “Beneath,” commissioned by The Abbey.
“Quietly” by Owen McCafferty, directed by Jimmy Fay, and featuring Patrick O’Kane, Declan Conlon and Robert Zawadzki, runs at the Irish Repertory Theatre, which is back home at a renovated 132 W. 22nd St. until Sept. 11. Tickets at www.Irishrep.org
