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Geraldine Hughes gave a great performance earlier this year in the Irish Repertory Theatre’s webcast of Brian Friel’s “Molly Sweeney,” a “staging” so technically innovative and incontestably superior in artistic merit that it set a high-water mark for online theater in America. Now Ms. Hughes is back, this time with “Belfast Blues,” her 2003 autobiographical one-woman play about how she grew up in and survived Northern Ireland’s violent Troubles. Filmed live at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 2019, it was first performed in New York in 2005, at which time I saw and reviewed it. I was impressed then, but I’m even more impressed a decade and a half later…
“Belfast Blues” starts out as a sweet comedy about growing up poor—four kids to a bed, no indoor plumbing—in an urban slum. You don’t have to be Irich, much less Catholic, to be charmed by Ms. Hughes’s tales of her childhood, including a vignette about her first communion (“If you chew it, you go to hell”) that made me laugh out loud, something that doesn’t often happen when you’re watching a show alone. She conjures up character after character smoothly and skillfully, eschewing props and scenery to assist in spinning her illusions. All she needs is her lovely, accent-perfumed voice and infinitely expressive eyes (the “Belfast blues” of the title) to lure you into a world that she recalls with understandably mixed but rarely harsh feelings.
The tone of Ms. Hughes’ play is so joyous at first that you’ll sit up straight when she refers, in passing and with deceptive casualness, to “the first child killed in the Troubles.” With these words, she starts to change the key of “Belfast Blues,” and a few minutes later, the overheard words of a soldier put you fully on the spot: “So far, one fatality. Young boy. Decapitated, sir. Blew his f—ing head off.” From then on, the happy parts are tightly interwoven with violence…
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Read the whole thing here.A trailer for Belfast Blues: