Double Cross review: Thomas Kilroy's hi-tech play gets an analogue production

Kilroy frames Brendan Bracken and William Joyce as Cain and Abel-like brothers, forged together by one actor's performance. Photo: Melissa Gordon

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Nov 1-10

★ ★ ★ 

At its premiere in 1986, Double Cross was the most hi-tech Irish play yet to come along. Other playwrights (Tom Murphy in Bailegangaire) had fed scene notes into the ghostly transmissions of an onstage radio. But the uncanny video projection in Thomas Kilroy’s play, allowing Stephen Rea to appear simultaneously in two roles, was something never seen before.

That may seem quaint in this digital age but there’s no reason why Double Cross has to be. In fact, with its built-in tech, swapped disguises and audience address, it feels like an antecedent to the absurdist wirings of contemporary theatre. Throw in face-front and amusingly flat performances, and it could resemble something Forced Entertainment brewed up.

Director Jimmy Fay’s production for the Lyric Theatre and Abbey Theatre is lively but conventional. Scenes from 1940s England and Germany, dressed by Ciaran Bagnall, are preoccupied with polished historical details. The video projection by Neil O’Driscoll is glossy. Chris Warner’s sound design throws in early-century ditties and squiggly radio dials, as if transmitting a handsome period drama. It all seems analogue compared to the play’s radical premiere.

It should be said that Kilroy’s script is anything but straightforward. It frames two real Irish-born men as Cain and Abel-like brothers, forged together by one actor's performance, in this case: the hard-working Ian Toner. 

We follow the Westminster politician Brendan Bracken, fearful of being exposed as a faux Englishman, just as he’s receiving a prestigious promotion by Churchill as Minister for Information. Bracken then wages a broadcasting war with the Germany-based William Joyce, a Nazi propagandist emitting false war reports to England. 

It’s easy to see why Fay brought the play back, with its depictions of fake news, rousing anti-immigrant rallies and self-invented influencers. “What does it say about society that a trickster can rise to the top?” teases William in one of his broadcasts. 

Toner, who already played one of the biggest stage sociopaths this year in Look Back in Anger, speeds through two more fustian characters. His Bracken is ostentatious and irate, his Joyce sullen and abusive. He’s well assisted by the supporting performances of Charlotte McCurry and Sean Kearns, but his take on Kilroy’s exhausting Pirandello-style comedy is less durable. 

That’ll be a challenge for most, in a play that’s tonally bananas. With comedic scenes such as Bracken zooming through several phone calls (devising a different lie for each), or Joyce ludicrously reconciling with his wife before the ink dries on their divorce, the play alternates wildly between light-headed farce and darkly nationalist rhetoric. (You mightn’t think there’s much of an audience for such a thing but Double Cross is already sold out, proving Kilroy’s profile, even though he hasn't had a play in Dublin in eight years).  

At the root of both men’s prejudice, Kilroy ingeniously understands, is their unhappiness with where they come from. Theirs was an Ireland repressed by political allegiances and religious conservatism. Watching the play now, when populism is depressingly resonant, it seems to pack another doubling-effect: fascism, once again, is close to home.