Pentecost

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

***

There comes a point in any play – usually within the first 20 minutes – when you know whether it’s going to take flight or not. Are you going to be caught up and carried into another world, or will you be bumping along the ground, peeking at your watch and longing for the interval?

Pentecost, Stewart Parker's last play (1987), is set in 1974 Belfast, during the Ulster Workers' Council strike. It occupies an ambivalent space between the two, with moments of stark transcendence. But there are times when it seems to be little more than an empty, occasionally tortuous exchange of words between ciphers.

You can’t miss the symbolism; it’s an insistent force throughout. Lenny, a feckless trombonist, has inherited the last house in the road between the two warring tribes: a drab and comfortless shell, stuffy with dead lives, “slap-bang in the firing line”. His alienated wife, Marian, turns up and surprises Lenny with an offer to buy the place, which he reluctantly agrees to, in return for a divorce.

Marian wants to be left alone with her troubles, but her solitude is soon disrupted by Ruth, who's fleeing a violent marriage; and then by Peter, a posturing flâneur in a sheepskin coat, unable to keep away from the city he despises.

There's also the querulous presence of Lily, a recently deceased former owner of the house who is nursing painful secrets of her own. Lily – crabbed, suffering and suspicious in a compelling performance by Carol Moore – lifts the production: you really believe in this ghost. It's harder to believe in Judith Roddy's Marian and Paul Mallon's Lenny. Part of this is Parker's fault, for burdening his main characters with inflated philosophical pronouncements, or with arch and knowing phrases. (Lenny actually says to Marion, "I'm beginning to feel a trifle testy at your demeanour".)

Yet when Pentecost is given room to breathe, for silences to stretch and elapse, for language to be simple and heartfelt, eloquence follows. Until Oct 18