Sebastian Barry’s shimmeringly poetic memory play is a portrait of a man with tangled allegiances. Thomas Dunne, the chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan police until 1922, was Barry’s great-grandfather. A loyal servant of the British Crown, he was considered a traitor – a “Castle Catholic” – in the wake of Irish independence.
When we meet Dunne (Owen Roe) he is an old man in an asylum in the 1930s, grieving his many losses and haunted by memories of his son, killed in the first world war. Wearing grubby long johns, in a cell-like room, he is visited by an aggressive orderly, Smith (Cillian Ó Gairbhí), who relishes reminding him that the world has changed and there is no place for him in the new dispensation.
