Minute After Midday

Project Arts Centre, Dublin

Based unabashedly on the Omagh bombing of August 15th, 1998, Ross Dungan’s monologue play dramatises an event so horrific and vivid that it seems difficult to transform. Yet that is what this memory play, for 15th Oak Productions, does, recalling the terrorist explosion on Lower Market Street from three different imagined perspectives, nudging its details ever so slightly from fact into fiction.

Reshaping genuine tragedy for the purpose of theatrical effect is, to put it mildly, a tricky business. Adapters may smuggle their concerns into classic allegory, as Tom Paulin did with The Riot Act, or approach from unexpected angles, as Brian Friel's Freedom of the Citydid, invoking Bloody Sunday but setting its action two years before the event.

Here, though, the attack is addressed head on, and only the people – and, for some reason, the time – have been changed. All characters and culprits are fictitious while 3.10pm, the time that the Omagh bomb exploded, has been altered, perhaps for the sake of poetry.

Along interweaving monologues, we meet a very young girl, Elizabeth, (Claire Hughes, playing well below her years), fixated with a denim jacket in a shop window. We next encounter a kind, elderly Protestant, Mari Jennings (Eimear O’Riordan, playing well above her years), who tells us of her considerate, endearingly awkward husband, running errands in the town on the day of their wedding anniversary. And we meet Conor, a young dissident Republican on a dreadful mission.

Neither the emotions of the event nor the play’s message are ambiguous, yet Dungan’s first play is inclined to tug on our heartstrings. The speeches each lay heavy emphasis on seemingly banal details: a pink dress, the denim jacket, Mr Jennings’s wicker basket, and their symbolism begins to clang with repetition. Showing, rather than telling, is a keener route to an audience’s empathy, but that is not the strength of the monologue format.

Instead, co-directors Dungan and Emily Reilly focus on structure where the criss-cross of perspectives is stridently reminiscent of Conor McPherson’s monologues. When a spectator’s mind, assisted by an all-too familiar history, will naturally canter ahead of any plot revelations, the intention must be to retrieve human faces from the rubble of history, to which end the cast all offer creditable performances.

Parsing reality into a neatened narrative, however, runs the risk of seeming glib. The truth, in this case, hurts more than fiction.

– Runs until Saturday