A Night in November

The night in November in A Night in November by Marie Jones at the Trafalgar Studios is the one in 1993 when Northern Ireland faced the Republic in a World Cup qualifying soccer game at Windsor Park, Belfast, and the result was a draw. The bigger, result, though, was a qualification from their group for the Republic to go to the finals in America, where the team won a famous victory against Italy before succumbing to the inevitable.

This is the background to the story of Kenneth McCallister, an East Belfast Protestant and wimpish dole clerk who reconsiders his life and allegiances on the terraces, cheering Jack Charlton’s team of “mercenary Irishmen” then finding himself transported to a state of glowing, non-partisan national pride in New York on the same summer night that, back home, six Catholics are massacred in O’Toole’s bar in Loughinisland.

As a dramatic monologue, the piece has its creaky and implausible moments, but the author of Stones In His Pockets is no slouch when it comes to highlighting comic characteristics on both sides of the sectarian divide, and television stand-up and chat show host Patrick Kielty is an adept, not to say well-qualified, chronicler of the tragic discrepancies.

The eager-to-please, fresh-faced, ginger-haired 36 year-old from County Down lost his own father, murdered by Protestant paramilitaries, in the recent Troubles, so would be fully justified in playing up the Republican wish fulfilment of Jones’s romanticised narrative.

But he doesn’t. Quite apart from mastering the ebb and flow of the story, its detailed panoply of characters and incident (and the words themselves) – no mean feat for a “non-actor” – Kielty allows each twist and revelation to take him by surprise, off-setting the beguiling naivety of the writing with his own brand of winning charm.

Kenneth’s frist trip down the Falls Road with a Catholic colleague is as funny as a fairground ride. He meets the puritanism of his wife and the bigotry of his father-in-law with the (unlikely) response of discovering flaws like sudden cracks in the plasterwork. But he also conveys the emotional rush at a football game and a touching belief that good feelings can be converted into rational behaviour.

I saw the first production of this play twelve years ago in an IRA stronghold in West Belfast. Dan Gordon’s brilliant performance was that of a numbskull mending his ways and finding the true light. In these more settled times, and in the neutral ambience of the West End, Kielty and director Ian McElhinney reveal the play for what it really is: an attempt to pre-empt politics in a vision of a united country.

– Michael Coveney