There’s an archetypal fringe-type play that lurks mainly, thank God, in the realm of stereotype rather than on real stages. It’s grim, hectoring, soap-operatic, full of cod-relevance and banal, adolescent ruminations on Big Themes such as God and stuff. It wears its heart on its sleeve to cover the hole where theatrical craft and socio-political subtlety should be.

It exists, to be sure, but I’ve been lucky enough to avoid it, by and large. That is, until Mirari Productions’ When Irish Hearts are Praying came along to wallop me across the head, then invite me to “join the conversation” it allegedly started, on Facebook and Twitter naturally.

Oh, writer/co-director Aoife Grehan’s three-character, hour-long production, centering on a quare sort of post-Celtic-Tiger crime-of-passion, isn’t pure cliché. It leaps around a bit chronologically, switches from monologue to naturalistic drama, and boasts a series of wee twists and revelations that you could set your watch by, though not necessarily anticipate. The acting is good (especially Hannah Scott as a woman wronged), there are a few choice lines, and it’s the second show I’ve seen this month, alongside Man of Valour, to cast near-future Dublin as chaotically dystopian. (Okay, make that “more chaotically dystopian”.)
But in post-Catholic Ireland, this one surely counts as a penance.

Harry Browne