Love across the barricades. It’s a familiar and recurring plotline in stories and plays about Northern Ireland. But in Niall Rea's pithy, hour-long drama, the barricades are constructed upon sexual rather than sectarian politics. Still, social and cultural division provides the climate for an intriguing examination of the struggle for personal identity in an inherently conservative society, fraught with violence and prejudice.

The piece forms an integral element of Rea’s academic research into gay identities in the environment in which he was raised, and encompasses a variety of interlocking individual life experiences, all of them informed by the difficulties of growing up and coming out during and after the Troubles. Its themes and issues are universal, rendering it a piece which can – and should – travel widely. Whatever one’s own background, it is impossible to avoid being drawn into the heart-breaking inner turmoil of a beautiful, sweet-natured young man, born out of his time and out of his body.

Audience participation is sought on arrival, when scraps of black paper and pens are handed around with a request for prayers, pledges or reflections to be placed onto the set with a view to informing the performance.

As designer, director and writer Rea has a clear vision of how the story should be presented. In the cramped, claustrophobic surroundings of the Belfast Barge, the seating arrangements bring the audience challengingly close to Paul C. Boyd’s tormented, stripped down presence, though the constant use of a microphone in such a confined space is something of a distraction. A flimsy set, lit by a single light bulb, registers as a shabby dressing room, a nightclub stage and a boxing ring, in which the anonymous central character embarks on a dramatic physical transformation while doing battle with his critics, his family, his lovers and himself.

We watch fascinated as, in uncompromising video close-up, Boyd’s slight, naked body and intense facial features gradually morph into a defiant, wild-haired, hard drinking seductress. Each time the character looks into the mirror, Conan McIvor’s skillful camera work allows him to make direct eye contact with the audience and for the audience to catch every nuance of his expressions and feelings. Thus, beneath the cosmetic glamour, we are admitted to intimate glimpses of the desperation and neediness of this special son of an adoring mother, whose barely suppressed sexuality has made him a target for playground bullies and street thugs.

That mental and physical torment is hugely exacerbated by the tribal hatred and paramilitary violence raging in the streets around him. We shiver at his propensity to dance with death by becoming involved with someone from ‘the other side’, here a militant republican activist, who lives by the gun. To the strains of a squeaky concertina, Boyd raspingly delivers a bruised, tongue-in-cheek serenade to his "beautiful, closeted freedom fighter".

Laughter and pathos rule in equal measures in this high energy, no-holds barred performance, which offers no easy solutions. The shy, mixed-up boy may at last have found both a voice and an alternative persona, but he has been replaced by a strident, snarling transgender performer, proclaiming his identity from behind a diamante-encrusted balaclava.

Jane Coyle is a Belfast-based freelance arts journalist, critic and screenwriter, who regularly contrubutes to The Irish Times, The Stage, Culture Northern Ireland and BBC Radio Ulster.