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Marking 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement, Tim Edge’s Belfast-set new play catapults us right back to the height of the Troubles. Under the menacing shadow of the Black Mountain, darkness rises in the city. It is a period of brutality, violence and worry. Ben Kavanagh’s visceral production reflects this and twists our stomachs, charged with a sense of ever-present and advancing destruction.
The Ryan family is divided. Dad Cashal has convinced his teenage son Alan to join the IRA, despite his wife and daughter Niamh’s pleas to keep him safe. Now, Alan has been arrested and imprisoned. Niamh is lost without her brother, and furious with both her parents. So she turns to a life of violence. The play follows Niamh as she grows from a wide-eyed new IRA recruit to a toughened key extremist player. Playing her, Evanna Lynch has none of the airiness of the part she is forever associated with, aka Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter films. Instead she corrodes piece by piece into somebody hardened, headstrong and explosive.
Kavanagh has a knack of making Belfast feel dangerously confining. A mammoth hulking rock is hoisted above the stage by ropes that look as though they could drop it, crashing, at any moment. Actors appear from the shadows and disappear again just as quick. ‘We’re prisoners of this city,’ says Cashal to his daughter – but it is true. With back-stabbing and secrecy in almost every scene, the place they call home feels inescapable and turbulent. So much so, you never quite know where the story will take you.
Edge’s endlessly surprising script covers a huge amount of ground but keeps up the propulsive momentum. From hushed scenes of extremist planning, we hurtle onto verbal family spats and head-on confrontations with the other side. Supported by Joseph Ed Thomas’s eerie lighting design, it has all the intensity of a good thriller.
It’s not faultless. Flora Montgomery swaps between two roles so suddenly that it takes a while to get to grips with her pair of characters; I heard one couple in the interval say it took them an hour to work out she wasn’t playing one part. Some of the violence looks amateurish and doesn’t sting with enough fright. Conversely, one of the graphic abuse scenes dances on the line of becoming torture porn.
In an era when British politicians have started to become very cavalier about Northern Ireland, ‘Under the Black Rock’ is a flawed but powerful look back at a recent history that remains simmering.