Review: Cyprus Avenue

Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The office of a clinical psychologist in Belfast, the city at the heart of The Troubles, which pitched protestant against catholic for the three decades, is the setting of David Ireland’s 2016 harrowing comedy, Cyprus Avenue.

Eric Miller has a problem, a staunch protestant from East Belfast, he’s just become a grandad. It should be a cause for celebration but there’s a problem, his newborn granddaughter looks like Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Féin. Are the Republicans attempting to infiltrate his home, a Unionist stronghold, through underhand means?

90 minutes without an interval, Cyprus Avenue is outrageous and disturbing and proves the perfect vehicle for David Hayman, who delivers a tour de force performance, leaving the stage but once during the piece. The rest of the time Hayman is centre stage, a man in turmoil, raging against the world he was was brought up in, a world of hate, fear and violence, whilst trying to work out what it means to be Northern Irish.   

His is the muddled bar-room philosophy of an Orangeman caught between the intransigence of bigotry and a loss of cultural identity as the ‘values’ he has lived his life by become ever more irrelevant in a post Troubles world - “Without prejudice we are nothing”, he declares.

Confused and terrified of walking into a united Ireland, his thoughts and beliefs are captured in brutal eloquence by Ireland’s brilliant script, a razor sharp dissection of the futility of prejudice and extremism of all kinds but specifically sectarianism in this case. It is also a chilling study of toxic masculinity, of indoctrination and of male mental health. It’s a play that more than lives up to its billing as an ‘utterly hilarious, fast-paced’ and with ‘some extremely dark twists and turns’.

The language used throughout may be uncomfortable from the start, but what begins as a display of ingrained ignorance quickly becomes something far more tragic. There’s nothing likeable about Eric Miller, as he reflects on his ‘failed expectations and ruined dreams’. He’s ticks all the boxes; he is racist, homophobic, misogynistic and British, but also anti-English, and yet Hayman ensures that he is viewed by the audience with sympathy and a touch of pity.

Strong support comes from Jamie Marie Leary, cool and succinct as his psychiatrist, Bridget. Accents may wander from time to time but Sinead Sharkey and Ann Louise Ross, as daughter Julie and wife Bernie, prove believable while a further absurd twist is provided by the arrival of James Boal’s Slim, a gunman with anger management issues.

Shocking, gaspingly funny and deeply thought-provoking, this Tron Theatre production in association with Trafalgar Theatres, the new owners of The Pavilion, Cyprus Avenue is beyond doubt a piece of must see theatre.

Runs until Saturday 2 March. Tickets here.