Quietly, Lyric Theatre

Owen McCafferty’s Quietly premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin eighteen months ago, and reaches the playwright’s native Belfast via a triumphant stint at last year’s Edinburgh Festival.

On the surface its plot – two men meet in a bar, and clash over a Troubles atrocity that happened forty years ago – seems disappointingly unoriginal. Do we really need more plays examining sectarianism and its bloody consequences? If they’re as good as Quietly is, the answer is that we do.

What makes the play exceptional is the patient acuity of McCafferty’s writing, and the outstanding realisation of it by director Jimmy Fay and his two central actors.

The headline-grabbing performance is that of Patrick O’Kane, as the angry, embittered Jimmy, who lost his father when a Loyalist bomb was thrown into a Belfast pub, where half a dozen drinkers were watching a football match.

It was Ian, a teenager at the time, who threw it, and who seeks out Jimmy to attempt some form of truth-telling, however belated.

Declan Conlon’s slow-burning, interiorised Ian is a stark contrast to O’Kane’s explosive, combustible Jimmy. Together they foment a darkly menacing atmosphere, enabling director Fay to crank up tension in a series of excruciatingly extended silences, where each protagonist struggles to chain up violent emotions, and find the words to keep communication stuttering fitfully forward.

Quietly shows two things – that truth and reconciliation is painfully difficult; and that its benefits are limited. The empty chairs are still unoccupied afterwards, the empty hearts still grieving.

Quietly, though, is not pessimistic: a rapprochement of sorts is effected between Ian and Jimmy at the play’s conclusion, though it’s heavily freighted with haunted memories that can never be jettisoned by either. McCafferty’s compassionate autopsy of the post-conflict mentality has resonance far beyond the streets of Belfast. Addressing it, Quietly suggests, is inevitably painful and traumatic – but we need to do it.

Terry Blain

Quietly plays at the Lyric Theatre until 13 April.