The Head of Red O’Brien

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

Having spent years obsessively re-enacting The Hunt For Red October, Red O'Brien's wife has been driven to inflicting him with a near-fatal stab wound.

In hospital, he recounts the history of their “frenzies of loving and loathing” like a child addressing an imagined audience in his bedroom.

Originally written in 2001, The Head of Red O'Brienis in keeping with writer Mark O'Halloran's screenplays for Adam and Pauland Garageby offering a darkly comic look at a wounded outsider who would be otherwise overlooked.

As such, O’Brien (played by John O’Dowd) is starved of attention. The commotion he caused in hospital is a source of pride, his wife’s reading habits – and books in general – are an affront to his existence, and the violence he endures from her is preferable to being ignored.

Yet rather than sound like a man undone, he’s not only focused but energised by the idea of resuming their relationship and settling “back into the normal abnormal”.

It's a stance made clear through O'Brien's unhealthy adulation of Sean Connery's commanding role in The Hunt For Red October, drawing an analogy between the submarine captain's stubbornness in the face of danger with his own dysfunctional marriage.

Though the play takes 10 minutes to establish the premise and the overhead video clips are too fleeting to add anything but a distraction, the main flaw here is O’Brien’s articulacy.

For someone who blames words for serving as messengers of doubt, fear and anger, it’s difficult to believe this is an illiterate man still recovering his cognition.

Still, O'Dowd imbues the character with enough warmth that by the time he has outlined his unwinnable war of attrition against his wife, himself and even words, you can't help siding with the underdog . . . at least until O'Halloran tells the other side of the story with a new play Mary Motorhead, opening on January 31st.

– Runs until January 29th