Theatre review: Akedah

Named after a Biblical term from Abraham's fakeout sacrifice of Isaac, Michael John O’Neill's Akedah follows two sisters who grew up in a turbulent household - their father was abusive, their mother a prostitute who abandoned her youngest daughter in a crackhouse and was never seen again. Gill (Amy Molloy,) the oldest, was 15 at the time and tried to look after her much younger sister for a while, but after their father died Kelly was taken into care, and the sisters rarely communicated after that. One night Gill gets a cryptic phone call from her sister asking her to come to her, and she manages to track down Kelly (Ruby Campbell,) now 18, living at a Pentecostal megachurch on the Northern Irish coast, where she's been since leaving her foster home two years earlier. Gill thinks she's there to rescue her sister from being groomed, but the truth may be more personal.

Theatre review: Cyprus Avenue

Artistic Director Vicky Featherstone is currently directing both shows at the Royal Court, and both feature people's minds being fractured by paranoia. X might take us to the future in the main house but Upstairs Cyprus Avenue is dominated by the past, and the sectarian Troubles that have defined Northern Ireland for centuries. Black comedies don't come much blacker than David Ireland's play about Eric (Stephen Rea,) an Ulster loyalist who's spent his life fighting the IRA and hating all Catholics. Now there's a peace in which neither side got everything they wanted, and he's not sure what the country's identity is or, by extension, his own. This crisis has been bubbling under the surface until he sees his newborn granddaughter and becomes convinced that she's actually Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams in disguise, leading a charge to invade Protestant homes.

Theatre review: Over the Bridge

A rediscovery from 1960, when it caused some controversy in Northern Ireland, Over the Bridge was the first stage play by Sam Thompson, a lifelong worker and union man in the Belfast shipbuilding industry. The play focuses on the trade unions and the way they affected day-to-day work in the 1950s, but also looks back at the mass unemployment of the Great Depression, and forward to how bloody The Troubles would become in the subsequent decades. At the centre of the large cast are union representatives Rabbie (Sam O'Callaghan) and Davy (Robert Calvert,) who form the main line of communication between the workers and the head foreman, Mr Fox (Alan Mooney.) There's an array of problems large and small that threaten daily to halt work under strike action, but as sectarian differences start to become more of an issue, Thompson predicts the threat of physical violence becoming part of daily life as well.