Review: This Is Paradise

✭✭✭✭

Set against the backdrop of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the uncertainty of whether it could finally bring peace to Northern Ireland, This is Paradise is a monologue that can be seen as a metaphor for the country it is set in rather than just a tale of a troubled past relationship that hangs over the life of its main character.

The character is Kate, played by Amy Molloy. She is married to Brendy, a solid, dependable and dull husband, who offers her a safe, albeit unexciting, future. He is the complete opposite of Diver, the man who was her lover ten years previously. Diver was twenty years older than her, and his passion for younger women was matched only by his passion for reckless self-destruction.

He returns to her life after she receives a call from the person who replaced her in it. Will she take the journey from Belfast to see him and what will it mean for the life she has now, including the child she is expecting with Brendy?

That she does return, taking a train to Coleraine and then a bus out to the forgotten place where Diver resides, is of course inevitable. There would not be a play if she didn’t go. What the journey, and meeting Diver, brings back to her goes deeper than just their relationship, however. An earlier relationship with Big Joe, who was perhaps the real love of her life both before and after he died in an accident, looms over proceedings, and the conflict between who she was then and who she is now is ever present.

This is where the parallels with Northern Ireland at the end of the 20^th century really come into play. Diver is a connection to her past and her country’s past. Is the country able to make a new start? Is Kate able to move away from her past and embrace the life she now has? Her pregnancy represents both the opportunity and the risk with concerns over whether the baby is still alive as well as hope for what they will bring.

Michael John O’Neill’s script meticulously works all of the strands of the political situation into a deeply personal story that is performed with total commitment and intensity by Molloy. It is often very bleak, but has moments of fierce humour too. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those who do want to drink it, it will be very rewarding.

Traverse, to 28 August 

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