Love Matters

Project Cube, Dublin

A lot of things can change in 10 years, someone tells Big Ernie, a loyalist hardman nearing the end of a prison sentence at the centre of Gary Mitchell’s new play.

Indeed, with exquisitely poor timing, his wife has asked for a divorce, his son has reached the age of adulthood with no conspicuous evidence of having become a man, and the peace process has stranded the UDA in a bitter standoff with the PSNI. But Ernie seems indifferent to a more profound transformation in Aisling Ghear’s production, which might represent any loyalist’s worst fears: everyone is speaking fluent Irish.

There are some simple politics around the idea of a community’s representation: who is portraying who and for whom? Mitchell has always chronicled the tensions of the working-class loyalist community of Rathcoole, his home, bringing its voice to wider audiences. This has meant great personal sacrifice. In 2005, his family was firebombed from their home by rogue members of the UDA. Putting words in the mouths of loyalists, in whatever language, requires a combination of defiance and empathy, contradictory approaches that might explain why Love Matters is so uneven.

Working with extreme economy, designer David Craig offers a backdrop of severe pillars and a cheerless settee, with blood-red colours that peep out under an incomplete white-wash. Symbolically unsubtle, certainly, but it suggests something serious. Yet Diarmaid Murtagh’s twitching performance, as Big Ernie’s bumbling right-hand man Darren, immediately establishes a much broader tone. Directors Bríd Ó Gallchoir and Tony Devlin clearly hope to position the show as a tragicomedy, but instead we get a farce with a sombre ending.

Although Mitchell’s programme note reveals that he once considered Irish “a joke” (the play was written in English and translated by Andrea Higgins), language is not an obstacle to any constituency’s deeper access as much as the more universal problem of characterisation. Among a gallery of types – Seán Ó Muireagáin’s psychotic tough guy, Tara Breathnach’s hot young wife, Cillian Ó Gairbhi’s earnest 18-year-old suitor, Nollaig MacAodha’s glum detective – nobody is afforded any substance while Mitchell concentrates on the mechanics of the plot, which are somehow still clunky and confusing.

There is still time for polemics, such as one character’s assertion that IRA members emerged from prison with degrees, better equipped to deal with peace-process realities than loyalist bodybuilders. Given that the same statement was made in Mitchell’s last play, 2006’s Remnants of Fear, there is a sense that he has said all this before, and that neither a different language nor muddled tone provide an insightful way of saying it again.