Quietly

Let’s boil Owen McCafferty’s Quietly down to its essentials. Two men arrange to meet in a pub. There’s a football match on the telly. They talk about an incident from the mid-1970s whilst a Polish barman watches on. Then they leave.

Perfectly everyday, you might think. But this is Belfast, and the two men, from different sides of the holy divide, are facing-off over a callous act of sectarian violence that took place at the height of The Troubles. Jimmy, now atheist, has been reeling ever since. He wants to hear Ian’s side of the story.

So how do you begin to heal decade-deep scars? Can you reconfigure the pieces of a broken, blood-spattered past and find, if not harmony, then a handle on which to grab, and begin again?

McCafferty explores the limits of reconciliation and the inadequacy of forgiveness with some scintillating dialogue that, at times, is devastatingly penetrative. It’s in the waves of silence, though, that we feel the burden of history; the weight of incomprehensible action and consequence. Two men—hard, hurt, dislocated—grappling with a past, and a self, they no longer recognise.

It’s a mighty piece of work, this, born of simplicity and enhanced by an authentic design from the piled-high barsnacks to the frothy pints poured—regularly—by immigrant barkeeper, Robert.

Patrick O’Kane’s glowering Jimmy and Declan Conlon’s weary-faced Ian are well-matched opponents, their exchanges crackling with fury, desperation and wretched grief.

Intimate, talky, tight-as-a-drum and pregnant with metaphor, the tone is one of simultaneous hope and circular tragedy.

Quietly makes a big noise.