A black comedy with a bleak underbelly, Gary Mitchell’s Burnt Out is a pungent portrait of a Northern Ireland perpetually pinioned between a stubbornly persistent past and an elusive future that slips away each time it seems within reach.
Launching this year’s Belfast International Arts Festival, Mitchell’s tenth production at the city’s Lyric Theatre sees him returning to all too woefully familiar territory. The Troubles may have ended, but the inherited tribal allegiances, atavistic enmities, religious suspicions and class divides it fed on with cannibalistic greed remain; veritable land mines thinly hidden beneath the surface of a society straining to move on and away from violent sectarianism.
Mitchell has long been one of the most articulate and acutely critical observers of the Protestant experience of Northern Ireland’s recent past. Burnt Out is liberally laced with the mordant regional wit that has served as a safety valve throughout the Troubles and beyond, and which he has made his own.
It filters Mitchell’s own perilous experience—he and his family were intimidated out of their home in the Protestant hinterland of North Belfast by paranoid paramilitaries—through the fractured prism of an Alan Ayckbourn domestic farce and the somewhat strained political topicality of late David Hare.
It’s a tall order in a tale of a young, well-to-do couple—teacher Michael, with his dog, and hair-salon owner and cat-lover Cheryl—secure enough in their new home (described with elegant minimalism by Conor Murphy’s stylishly spare set) to contemplate expanding the hairdressing business and extending the family with children.
Such plans and dreams are scuppered when their paradise is polluted by the building of a bonfire to mark the July 12 celebrations on their doorstep. In the blink of an eye, their idyll is shattered, sucking them into a farcical vortex that includes Michael’s unreconstructed paramilitary-aligned brother, Donny, “bonfire committee liaison officer” Lesley and local cop, PC McGoldrick. What ensues leads to murderous consequences that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Greek tragedy.
Channelling Tarantino-era Uma Thurman, Kerri Quinn’s savvy Cheryl adeptly metamorphoses into Lady Macbeth. As sharp as the haute couture costumes she wears, she steers through the mounting menace and threat to mete out a brutal justice of her own.
Watching helplessly as his perfect life quickly disintegrates around him, Terence Keeley describes Michael’s gradual descent into hell as old rules and norms are turned upside down with affecting bewilderment and vulnerability.
Employing muscle and sex, mind-games and menace, his tormentors are manipulative furies incarnate in the shape of Caolán Byrne’s gruff, bluff, physically imposing brother Donny and Shannen McNeice’s sassy gang-leader on the make Lesley.
Caroline Curran’s overworked, sceptical PC provides wryly comic punctuation throughout, impotently trying to make sense of the looking-glass world she finds herself in.
If Burnt Out lacks the immediate gut-punch impact of Mitchell’s earlier work, it remains a potent portrait of a community marginalising itself even as it insists on primacy and priority, cleverly counterpointed by Jimmy Fay’s glossy, slickly marshalled production.