Review: BEHIND CLOSED WALLS, Jack Studio Theatre

A soldier, hooded, is tied to a chair and interrogated by a volunteer in a balaclava. The issue is The Troubles, but we learn that it's The Second Troubles that concern our pair, the Good Friday Agreement collapsing after a hard border was re-introduced and sectarian violence flared again.

Seeing this production on the very day that the DUP boycotted Stormont again, one cannot but be aware that it's a future that steps closer every day. But these young men find that they have something in common and things don't quite turn out as either expected.

Daryl J Blair (who also wrote and directed this two-hander) and Tiernan Mullane create a plausible couple of lads in that 'separated - grown apart - meet again' scenario that we've seen many times before. Blair's Real IRA operative is an everyman radicalised by how the Second Troubles affected his family and longing for the simpler days of his childhood when he was a loner, but found others to be alone with. Mullane's squaddie is harder to work out. Is he telling the truth or stringing his captor along? Is he following training on what to do in such interrogations or busking it? Is he actually executing a complicated plan to take his own life?

Such is the main flaw with the pacy, hour long play. The needy lad is easy to place as a person, but the soldier never resolves beyond the sum of his actions, which are often inexplicable. That would be fine were the complexities of his motivations unraveled but, if anything, they just tangle around themselves more and more as the narrative plays out. Whether it's all a metaphor for two communities grasped forever in a deathly embrace, I wouldn't like to hazard, but it leaves you looking forward to a second act resolution that never comes.

It's been 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed and it looks more in danger than at any time since. While David Ireland and others have covered The Troubles and their aftermath on stage, few dramas (in London at least) address the issue from the perspective of those who grew up knowing nothing but its uneasy peace and fear for its future disintegration. Consequently, Blair's production is a welcome addition to theatre's response to an age-old, and still intractable, question - we catch the secondary meaning of the play's title.

Behind Closed Walls is at the Jack Studio Theatre until 29 October

Photo Credit: Max Curtis

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