Forced Upon Us, which opened at this year's as always overtly republican West Belfast Feile an Phobal, has been billed as an anti-RUC play, calling for that organisation's disbandment.
It was made notorious when the Northern Ireland Arts Council withheld pencilled-in funding of £20,000, on the grounds that the scripts it had seen were neither complete nor of sufficient artistic merit.
In fact, the production, whose style antecedents could be found in sources as diverse as Brecht, Oh What a Lovely War and That Was the Week That Was, launches a mercilessly savage satirical attack on the founders of Northern Ireland, particularly Andy Down's pompously and weasily ingratiating James Craig and Kieran Cunningham's Edward Carson - portrayed as concerned more with his own glory than that of the putative province.
The walls of the new Theatre on the Rock are pasted with reworked sepia photographs of the 1920s and the stage is a long pier dividing the audience in halves and culminating at either end in a ramp atop which rival orators, Carson and Connolly, contend. In present-day Belfast, a girl has been raped by a policeman, prompting her father to ask, how did we come to this? History rolls back to the days of Redmond and Connolly, Craig and Carson, the Great War, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the B Specials, the anti-Catholic pogroms of the 1920s spearheaded by RIC Det Insp Nixon, a well-documented psychopath.
The style is declamatory, the soundscape of gunfire and Titanic launch impressive, the songs sung by the felicitously named Terence O'Neill stunning, the caricaturing of Unionist politicians of the day - using only their own words from record - savage.
Apart from one decent, doomed trade unionist, all working-class Prods are portrayed as mad-dog bigots - if not hunchbacked to boot. All Catholics are decent family folk suffering ethnic cleansing. IRA murders pass unnoticed.
Pam Brighton directs her passionate cast with telling panache and the text's most palpable hits are the parallels between the 1920s and recent events: Nixon and the Shankill Butchers; Craig's assessment of a happy smiling Ulster chiming with David Trimble's Nobel acceptance speech; Stormont banter as Thatcherist as any in the Assembly.
The play's weakness is in the failure of the invented portions of the text to reach any verisimilitude with actual speech patterns of past decades, but if the final text the Arts Council received was in the main as directed here, its ultimate assessment (to be delivered tomorrow) must surely be positive.
Runs until Friday, August 6th.