Grenades

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

Even the smallest detonations can have explosive consequences in Tara McKevitt’s considered monologue for Mephisto Productions. It begins with the young Nuala Kelly’s recollections of her vociferous objections to her brother’s crucifixion (inconveniently, he was the star of his Northern Irish school’s passion play at the time), and leads steadily, from innocence to experience, towards graver sectarian upheaval.

We meet Emma O’Grady’s nine-year-old in the cold recess of a prison waiting room in the late 1980s, where she artfully avoids saying how she came to be there. It is the trick of delayed explanation that works more easily in a radio play, which was the original form of McKevitt’s full-length debut, and director Caroline Lynch’s production doesn’t quite conceal those origins.

“A burst of laughter erupted around the room,” says Nuala, more in the style of an essayist than a character, but it is one of few lapses in a script that treats its narrator’s naivety without condescension. Duly reporting her teenage brother’s ambitions to “devote his life to making women happy”, her single mother’s gossamer explanations for her father’s absence, or her grandfather’s equal-opportunities racism, Nuala becomes a credible witness when tragedy strikes, while McKevitt elegantly shows how the layers of religious inculcation, childish bullying and adult collisions are all subtly related.

The guileless narrator could become an obvious device if it wasn’t for two great strengths. The first is McKevitt’s communication of detail, deploying a lightness of touch, a wealth of warm humour and an admirable reticence to judge motivations: the grenades here are figurative and real, lobbed by Dalek-voiced nuns, bullying children, INLA gun-runners, or through cold revenge. The second strength is Emma O’Grady’s extraordinary performance, unshowy with her childlike mannerisms and fiery with purpose.

Those skills combined evoke a world where words and munitions are used to wound, but resilience and sacrifice can still be used to heal.

Runs until Saturday