Reviewed by Brendan Daly, Sunday Business Post – 26 October 2014
Rating: 4/5
Defender of the Faith is an unsettling depiction of personal and political breakdown. Set in rural Armagh in 1986, it opens with a snapshot of a fractured family. Joe, the play’s mercurial patriarch, is struggling with recent events: his wife has entered a psychiatric hospital, unable to cope with the suicide of their eldest son.
Joe and another son, Thomas, are members of a local IRA brigade under suspicion after a bomb they planted failed to detonate. Joe believes that one of the brigade has turned informer and asks the IRA’s senior command to send an interrogator, unleashing a wave of paranoia.
This 2004 script is the debut play of Stuart Carolan, the writer of RTÉ’s Love/Hate. That programme and this play map similar territory: claustrophobic underworlds splattered with verbal and physical aggression.
Here, informers’ bodies, their heads covered by black plastic bags, are dumped on the road at night, and the “say nothing” mantra infiltrates attempts at personal communication.
If Peter Gowen essays Joe with a powder keg volatility, Diarmuid de Faoite’s premeditated movements invest JJ, the interrogator, with a fearsome menace, delivering his lines with a slow-burning sulphur that charge his utterances with a sinister undertow.
Dappled with physical tics that enhance our sympathy for the character, Lalor Roddy’s wonderfully affecting performance as the simple-minded Barney reaches its climax when Barney expresses his unguarded compassion for a murdered informer, astounded that the dumped body was stripped of even its shoes and socks.
As Thomas, Michael Ford-FitzGerald confidently anchors this production, imbuing his character with both an endearing playfulness and a ferocious moral compass.
The high back wall of Owen MacCarthaigh’s shabby kitchen revolves to reveal the cowshed wall that frames the play’s external scenes, while Carl Kennedy’s sound design of military drumbeats between scenes fuels the simmering tension.
Director Andrew Flynn injects the production with a cinematic vim, sensitively balancing the play’s surreal humour with its graphic violence.
If the script occasionally hints that Carolan was still learning his craft (the overly-written denouement, for example, dilutes its impact), it also vividly conjures the brutal, insidious consequences of the Troubles on the individual.
