Lyric Theatre, Belfast

***

History, everybody knows, happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Rosemary Jenkinson’s new play for the Lyric almost takes Marx’s maxim as its plot structure.

It begins in 1966, in an East Belfast home, where a Catholic family in a largely Protestant neighbourhood begin drawing worrisome attention. Although spryly comic throughout, it has the gravity of the nascent Troubles, the first tremors of the violent sectarianism to come. The second act, set among new residents in the same house 50 years later, is much broader: a bevvy of tensions, embarrassments, political lampoons and sexual chicanery. If history really is repeating, director Jimmy Fay’s spirited production seems to say, now is the time to scoff.

The years are significant, both times of commemoration, and Fay begins with footage of the 50th anniversary of the Rising, when the pageantry resembled an effort to finish the job. On Grace Smart’s shoe-box proportioned set we find Vincent (Michael Condron) living with his pregnant wife (Kerri Quinn) and her younger sister (Susan Davey), earnestly writing a Rising-themed novel with the encouragement of absolutely nobody.

His writing is endearingly terrible, but Jenkinson is interested in how Vincent is gripped, if only in his own mind, by the same fervour as the revolutionaries. The call of history is hard to separate from a rush of blood to the head. Neither the pleas of his wife, the worrying rise of the UVF, the suspicions of his neighbours – jovially relayed by the postman and teddy boy Freddie (Thomas Finnegan) – nor the commands of his priest (Niall Cusack), will budge him. Finally, a firebomb will.

Flash forward to 2016, and the cast have been reshuffled into new roles: an enjoyable Davey, earlier the spirit of 1960s counter culture, is now a guarded Polish social worker, Marta, moving into an affordable neighbourhood with her husband Jim (Condron). But the hasty efforts of a strutting nationalist and broadly philistine Culture Minister (Quinn) to commemorate the rediscovered Vincent are both superficial and concerning. When new communities are facing the same old sectarianism, who needs this kind of attention?

Jenkinson, like Finnegan’s two freewheeling characters, is an equal-opportunities mocker: everybody here comes under fire, whether political hypocrites, social do-gooders, or even artists. Fay has a jukebox sweet spot for the 1960s, garlanding scenes with music, where even Paul Keogan’s lights briefly lend assistance to a jokey psychedelic interlude. If that suggests that the decade’s idealism would always be snuffed out by harsh realities, the play seems more hopeful about this era’s weathered cynicism. The characters do little more than snigger at the politicos in 2016, and the play loses amperage, but they do chase them away.

That might be an insubstantial lesson to take from the past, but, in its modest way, it counts as progress.

Until May 14