Sometimes you just get lucky. A small theatre, a new play, a young actor, a sleeting night. Going out to theatre can seem a gamble not worth the pains. Both play and performance are terrific. Speedy is a young man on the dole in East Belfast. The violence internally in Northern Ireland has subsided but there are rumblings of another war fought far away.
He plays flute in a marching band for competition. He hangs about with his three mates. He drinks, he brawls, he flirts with the girls.
He deals with his mom and her parade of boyfriends. That is until best mate Stig does the unthinkable; he signs up to go fight and is sent to southern Iraq. Actor Josh Sticklin plays all the characters in the play.
He sometimes uses his highly skillful impersonations to mock, such as when he portrays his mother reading to him about how to simulate orgasm. He also rages, as when he assumes the bloated body of her most recent boyfriend, fat Raymond, who tries to gain entrance to the bathroom Josh is occupying.
But always these role-playings are in the service of his story, that of a somewhat troubled young man who insists on staying a knucklehead. Director Abigail Isaac has taken the set of the other Keegan Theatre show in rep, The Weir , and put it to very clever use for this one-man show. A big three sided bar that takes up most of the stage becomes a bedroom when Speedy flings himself across the bartop onto his bunk. When he crouches in front, the same bar becomes a street corner or a bunker in the war.
