picture from Liverpool Live.
Cast: Finbar Lynch, Luke Griffen, David Ricardo-Pearce, Yasmine Akram,Youssef Kerkour, Lisa Kerr, David Rintoul.
Following on from last year’s highly intelligent and well worked play The Chronicles of Long Kesh that dealt with those imprisoned during the troubles in Ireland comes Playwright Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah, a strong and powerful play takes a long term look at the I.R.A. and the fall out between a group of people across 30 years in New York.
The play opens in 1972, just a few months after the events that became known world-wide as Bloody Sunday. Finbar Lynch as Irish American business David Costello gives a dramatic, humorous and emotional speech as he raises money for his and the country’s struggle against the British.
Although to some, the play may have been uncomfortable and somewhat unpalatable, its humour carried it through some of the more telling parts that would have had other writers shrinking and turning away from even considering writing.
The crux of the play hangs on the premise of who is the terrorist as the three men who occupy the flat in the Bronx talk about the events of 1993 and the attempted bombing of the World Trade Centre. Youssef Kerrour as police officer Tom Billy Coyle showed the short term thinking as he accused Muslims of wanting everyone to eat humus, all the lights to turn out and go back to the stone age, to which his two friends Ruairi O’ Drisceoil and Michael Doyle, played superbly and with much humanity by Luke Griffin and David Ricardo-Pearce, try to get through and point out the connections between the two organisations.
The play ends sadly and poignantly with the scene of the fireman in his flat which has remained mostly unchanged over the decades on the day that the Twin Towers were struck by terrorism.
The Big Fellah is a powerful, dramatic play which needs to be told and if you need a night out that will turn into a discussion on the rights and wrongs of fighting for a cause then this is the play for you.
4 stars
Ian D. Hall