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Chronicles of Long Kesh

This event has now finished Until Apr 17 2010 Tricycle, 269 Kilburn High Rd, London, NW6 7JR Full details & map

Theatre: Off-West End

Time Out says Rate it

By Sam Marlowe Posted: Thu Mar 25 2010

Internment, dirty protests and hunger strikes: they don't sound like the stuff of popular theatre. But Martin Lynch's evocation of life inside Northern Ireland's notorious prison is a lively montage of the personal, the political, the mundane and the horrifying, played out to a soundtrack of Motown music performed a cappella by the cast of Lynch and Lisa May's Belfast-born production. In a restless succession of episodic sequences we meet screws and inmates, loyalists and republicans, and their wives on the outside. Through fragments of conversation and confession, choreographed movement and song, the human detail of history emerges with pungent immediacy, though context is, frustratingly, largely left unexplicated.

The atrocities committed in the name of political convictions are never really addressed, and the writing, which draws on extensive interviews and research conducted by Lynch, is pacey but so choppy that it sometimes lacks both clarity and fluidity. But this is undeniably a colourful and involving piece of documentary drama, performed with passion and wit by five men and one woman - Jo Donnelly, as persuasive as the long-suffering spouse of Billy Clarke's prison officer poignantly driven to drunken despair as she is as swaggering, 'tasty dressin' UVF man' Billy Thumper McKibben. A vivid, if partial picture.

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