Embargo review: A play dressed like a War of Independence thriller

A train driver must decide between assisting the IRA or helping a vulnerable woman in Deirdre Kinahan's new play. Photo: Anthony Woods

Dublin Theatre Festival

★ ★ 

In thrillers, a high-speed pace helps build tension and create suspense. Writers can move things up a gear by putting in a vehicle that’s being pursued, a scene showing a car chase perhaps. 

Fishamble’s new play Embargo, written by Deirdre Kinahan, is set inside a train cab but the wheels don’t start turning for quite a while. When the driver Gracie (Matthew Malone) first turns to us, against the heavy mystery of Denis Clohessy’s ambient music, he gives a surreal account of being set upon by attackers, and covered in tar and feathers. In his eyes, he sees himself like Icarus, ready to fly. 

To an audience, we might see an omen of evil things ahead, of wax wings melting over dark waters. It’s an intriguing symbol stored in the mind, but as the script gathers the rest of its characters together during the War of Independence in Dublin, there are signs of too much technique. After Jack (Callan Cummins), an IRA fighter, sets the scene saying “This is the morning in question,” other figures repeat the word “Morning” in serious concert with each other, as if we didn’t hear it the first time. 

Though attracted to these repetitions, the chanting rhythms of something supernatural, Kinahan’s script shows variance in its chosen viewpoints of the war. In Mary Murray’s desperate Jane, who jumps into the cab while fleeing the police, we get a whole new set of priorities. Here is a woman volcanic with rage about how the labour movement was sacrificed by the fight for Independence, who is forced into precarity and might go to jail, leaving her children to starve. 

That puts Gracie in a difficult position. Bound by an arms embargo organised in solidarity with the IRA, he can assist Jane by breaking that order and put the train into motion, or paralyse the British forces on-board by keeping the locomotive at a standstill. 

The plot twist allows for interesting opposing forces that stir anticipation, pitting Jane against Cummins’s threatening Jack, the safe passage of a vulnerable woman against the demands of a republican struggle. But there aren’t any elaborate cover-ups, or the skilful distractions of red herrings. There isn’t a train racing against time. 

While Embargo can look dressed like a thriller, it doesn’t peddle much in false clues or bottling suspense. Rather, its jolts between dialogue and monologue, neatly contained by director Maisie Lee’s production, delve into hidden histories. Recalling Gracie’s time enrolled in the English army in WWI, Malone’s face reveals a hidden suggestive smile, and says “Hard to believe it now but I was a pin-up,” conjuring up new visions of life at the front. 

These backstories offer fresh perspectives but they also deviate from the urgency of events at hand. Towards the end, we are met with something tragic, a sad casualty of war, but the lack of momentum robs it of some impact. 

Streaming on fishamble.com