The Roaring Banshees review: This gangster play would be a scream if it spilled more blood

A rogue Cumann na mBan unit fight Chicago gangsters in Peter McGann and John Morton's new play. 

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★ ★

Once in an interview, Lynne Ramsay outlined her approach to her action film You Were Never Really Here. “I had to figure out where the violence comes from,” she said, which, in an era when brutal images stream constantly, isn’t easy to portray with shock.

Peter McGann and John Morton seem to be thinking the same thought. Their 2016 play The Hellfire Squad took an alternate version of Michael Collins’s hit squad, sat them at poker tables and sent them ambushing British soldiers, as if they had somehow ended up in an Irish Western. The mash-up of genre and history was as postmodern as a Tarantino film.

In between its shootouts, The Hellfire Squad introduced a number of alienations afflicting its male characters, none of which had room to be explored within the play's action structure. But The Roaring Banshees has a lot more success. McGann and Morton’s new gangster play for Devious Theatre - and the second in their Ripping Yarn Trilogy about the revolutionary period - finds a rogue Cumann na mBan unit who have the “comely maiden”-loving Éamon de Valera in their crossfires. The women know where the violence comes from.

This gang may have two leaders - the forward-looking Alice (a nicely understated Nessa Matthews) and smooth operations manager Kitty (Ali Fox, whose comic delivery is killer) - but the group are actually a democracy. The women’s right to vote fresh in their lives, they ask for a show of hands and decide their fate together. 

After a botched assassination attempt on de Valera, they flee for safety to Prohibition-era Chicago. They establish a business selling bootleg poitín (Aoife Spratt’s wide-eyed and wild-haired Flossie is the team’s brewer), which eventually lands them in the gang feud between Al Capone and Bugs Moran. You might think this is a detour from fighting the patriarchy back home, but as someone says: “The Italians are just another group of repressed Catholic mammy boys”.

Throughout, Alice reminds the group that they’re playing the “long game”. If she’s vaguely talking about women’s rights, they’ve a hell of a distance to go. But McGann and Morton generously give their characters a “short game” to seize the present. An adventure that frees Clodagh Mooney Duggan’s young woman from her maternal destiny in Ireland, that gives Laura Brady’s ex-nun her first sniff of cocaine, and finds Amy Dunne’s yearning stage diva a spotlight.

So why is it all a bit disappointing? As the women light up cigarettes in the dark, listening to the gruesome details of how gun-loving sociopath Síona (Áine Ní Laoghaire) lost her family in an attack by the Black and Tans, it dawns that this might be as bloody as the production gets. 

Director Sarah Baxter has gone with stylistic effects over grit. On a floor resembling an Art Deco detail in Áine O’Hara’s set, the terrific ensemble are gathered into defiant poses, facing into great blasts of smoke. Explosions glow bright in John Gunning’s lighting. If violence is important to gangster stories, here it’s more pretty than grisly. 

The most macabre scene - which involves Síona gleefully dismembering a henchman - doesn’t shed one drop of blood. But most crushing is that the anticipated shootout between the Roaring Banshees and the Chicago gangsters gets lost in a blur. Characters rush across the stage, their shots coming thick and fast, but impossible to take in on a single sitting. 

That gives the toothy script a defanged production. More butchery and it would be a scream. 


Runs until Aug 31st.