The Honey Trap at Irish Rep hits close to home in an unintended way
The encore run of The Honey Trap at Irish Repertory Theatre is a slick and tense memory play about soldiers, citizens, time, and duty. At the very top of the show, soldiers creep out of the smoky dark of upstage in combat gear, brandishing automatic weapons. Although this takes place during “The Troubles” in Belfast, when British soldiers were sent in to quell the violence between the Catholics and the Protestants (and I will stop right there at the risk of oversimplifying a very complicated subject), these armed men could have stepped right out of any of our news feeds from our very own American cities, where masked men who do not answer to anyone are arresting and killing whoever they wish.
In The Honey Trap, playwright Leo McCann presents a moment during the British occupation of the streets of Belfast, first from the point of view of two young—dare we say innocent—British soldiers who are confused as to why the Irish are throwing bricks and dead cats at them when they feel they are there to help and protect them. (Do some of these ICE guys really believe they are just arresting bad guys? Maybe. Did they all play way too much Call of Duty? Definitely.) Even I, your resident irreverent, cannot joke about this, because for the first time in my life I am ready to take up arms (if I had any) if these assholes try that shit in my town.
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They are in a bar drinking and talking shite, and that’s where the girls come into play. A honey trap is a clandestine operation using the promise of love and affection to compromise your target. The soldiers Bobby and Dave (played in flashback by Harrison Tipping and Daniel Marconi, respectively) are scoring mad points with two Irish lasses in a bar when the women lead the sweet and wide-eyed Bobby off to his fate, young Dave randomly deciding last minute not to join them. (A more selfish reason for Dave’s not going along might have fueled his grief and guilt as an adult in a more compelling way, rather than a dead cat. Cats are in grave danger in this play.)
The present-day action presents adult Bobby (Michael Hayden) telling this story to an oral history project based loosely on The Belfast Project. Adult Bobby begins to suspect that other participants in the project may have given information that could lead him to the women who led Bobby to his death years ago, and he goes down that rabbit hole.
Again, the question became for me—what are we prepared to do? Are these women guilty of something other than protecting their homes the only way they can? Even if they didn’t do the killing, they are surely somewhat responsible. These are the questions that arise in act two, as adult Bobby’s hunt for the surviving girl from the bar that night gives him more closure than he bargained for.
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The cast on the whole is supercharged with energy and commitment, and the direction keeps the audience on edge along with dramatic and jarring light and sound design. Though some of the casting choices left me scratching my head. Daniel Marconi (Young Dave) could not look less like Michael Hayden and is easily a foot shorter than him, whereas Harrison Tipping could be a young Michael Hayden. I spent the entire first scene with the characters swapped in my mind. A lot more could have been done during the dénouement between Bobby and Sonia (Samantha Mathis). This is meant to be a thriller of sorts; a few more twists might have been interesting. And please, if you’re going to point a gun at another actor on stage, don’t point it at their head. They never shoot a character on stage in the head; it’s nearly impossible to fake. The audience immediately knows, “He’s not going to shoot her.”
Kudos to the Irish Rep for another wonderful and thought-provoking night of theatre. Yes, this play will leave you dying for a pint of Guinness, and The Copper Still just across the avenue offers a discount to people who come from the theatre.
