The Big Fellah

Synopsis

Young fireman Michael Doyle decides to live up to his Irish heritage by joining the IRA. He’s recruited by Costello, the charismatic ‘Big Fellah’, who wants to use Doyle’s brownstone apartment in The Bronx as a safe house for an escaped killer. But it soon becomes clear that someone is leaking information to the FBI... A boisterous and witty story of loyalty, disillusionment and betrayal, set among the Irish American community of New York, Richard Bean’s (Harvest and England People Very Nice) darkly funny play spans three turbulent decades.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 26 October 2010

Ireland, Great Britain and the USA have been tangled in a see-saw relationship for the better part of two centuries. There have been appalling wrongs committed as well as acts of extreme generosity. Heroes and villains, traitors and patriots, victims and quasi-conquerors – they’re all natural products of this razor-wire knot.

Richard Bean’s new play is concerned basically with Irish Americans in the period 1972 to 1999. There’s support for the IRA and the PIRA, some of it vocal and emotional, quite a lot of it more deadly. Most of the action takes place in a Bronx apartment over this period. The title character is David Costello (Finbar Lynch), the senior IRA man but also an American citizen who fought in Korea and Viet Nam.

He’s a thinking man with a conscience, and Lynch brings out all the contradictory facets of his character in a characterisation which is ultimately moving as well as strangely heroic. Of the other men in his cell, the...

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