Here are Iggy and Gerry, two ageing transplanted brickies, sipping tea out of belated respect for their overblown livers and bickering about, well, nothing. Because if a man can’t cleave to the code of silence in his final, lonesome years, then he may be forced to utter his despair at a lifetime of saying – and daring – nothing. And that would be a howl of horror to shatter the world.
Playwright Owen McCafferty gets plenty of wincing laughs from his grim, grandstanding duo, and has two supporting actors wander in from the past to show us that Gerry blew his chance at love, and that Iggy has good reason to resist his friend’s plea for a last blast on the razzle in Belfast.
This device feels like cheating – after all, the hazards of communication are reduced if everyone around you can see what you mean. Still, Rachel O’Riordan’s direction is so static that interruptions are welcome: even Beckett, that most artfully reticent of Irishmen, introduced a third party now and then.
This is a savage story of squandered chances, but McCafferty has set himself a fearsome task and it is both predictable and disappointing that he ends, literally, in incoherence.