The Sign of the Whale

The Baby Grand, Belfast

“All Protestants are staunch, all Catholics are devout and all firemen wear breathing apparatus.” Such simplicities, we are informed here, became part of the basic lexicon for news reporters covering the violent years of the Troubles. And Jimmy McAleavey should know. As a former newspaper sub-editor, he is spot-on in his cynically humorous observations of his trade in this new play, directed by Michael Duke for Tinderbox. Set among the bombs and bullets and balaclavas of Belfast in 1977 ­– subject matter we had not thought to revisit — the central character is Dermy (Miche Doherty), a jaded headline writer, mentally crumbling under the collective strain of marriage to bossy Daphne (Mary Moulds), the excruciating grammar, which he is paid to polish, and the litany of death and destruction which he processes on a daily basis. His therapy is to walk the streets, usually at night, sardonically mapping out Belfast’s social and religious geography, as he goes in search of some kind of epiphany. Real or imagined, he finds it in the form of a great whale, which he believes to have swum right into the heart of his beloved city.

But in his frantic quest for this mythical monster –­ which spells good fortune for those of the Celtic tradition and, for Anglo-Saxons, is believed to be a reincarnation of the devil –­ he is knocked down by a car, only then to suffer an even worse fate.

Physically blinded but spiritually far-sighted, Dermy comes face to face in a hospital ward with an eyeless young hoodlum called Tony (John Travers), disfigured when a nail bomb blew up in his face. In Ciaran Bagnall’s bleached, cavernous set, it is as though these unlikely bedfellows have been pitched deep into the belly of the creature itself, engulfed in the eerie sound of whale song. From within this disquieting place, they struggle to find reason and hope and to make sense of the events that have brought them here. There are flashes of theatrical brilliance in this play of ideas, which is at once whimsical, surreal and all too real. Noisily staged vignettes, affording glimpses of the outside world, have the potential to act as cabaret-style interventions, but their cast of characters (Moulds and Michael Condron) are unconvincing and the deliberately loose textual structure of the whole thing occasionally falters, threatening to drown the storyline in a sea of words.

Runs until Saturday, then tours to Monaghan, Dundalk, Coleraine and Coalisland.