Grenades

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JOYCE MCMILLAN on GRENADES at the Tron Theatre, Glasgow, for The Scotsman 20.5.11
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3 stars ***

WITH the Queen’s historic visit to Ireland, powerful images of peace and reconciliation have dominated the media in both Britain and Ireland, over the last few days.  At the Tron, though, the theatre’s Mayfesto season is doing what the arts should do at such times; searching beneath the surface rhetoric for a truth that is often more troubled and intractable than politicians and heads of state would wish.  In the past fortnight, the Tron has already staged David Ireland’s Everything Between Us, about two Protestant sisters with fiercely opposing views on the peace process.  And now, straight from Galway, comes Mephisto Theatre’s powerful 50-minute monologue by Tara McKevitt, about the huge continuing legacy of emotional damage and inner violence left by the recent Troubles.

Emma O’Grady plays Nuala – a girl of twenty, looking back ten years to her childhood – who has grown up in a close-knit nationalist community in Northern Ireland.  Her life is full of secrets and lies, notably about the identity of her absent father; but when her adored older brother is found dead on a local beach, one miserable morning, the violent political undertow of the society she lives in begins to wash through her home, finally provoking a brutal  revenge, and taking her mother in its wake.

McKevitt’s writing has all the blistering narrative power and pace for which modern Irish monologue drama is famous, and O’Grady’s fierce, heart-wrenching performance is impossible to fault.  Sometimes, the show’s chosen image of the bursting grenade – a metaphor for the series of  shocking revelations that shatter and reshape Nuala’s early life –  seems a little forced, one literary idea too many in a story already powerful enough.  There’s plenty to enjoy here, though, in the story’s bleak vividness; and a great deal to think about, for those who imagine that in the deepest sense, the Troubles are over.

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