A Terrible Beauty

A Terrible Beauty

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

IT only takes a moment. A signature on a treaty, a word said - or not said - and history changes. The history that Ian Pattison fixes on here is the Irish civil war, which saw words give way to firearms, and escalate from guerilla skirmishes into all-out battles between two opposing groups of Irish nationalists. He homes in on the pivotal figure of Michael Collins, Commander in Chief of the Free State - pilloried and outcast by the Republican supporters of Éamon de Valera for signing an Anglo-Irish treaty they felt betrayed all they'd fought for in the recent Irish War of Independence.

No need, really, to spell out what attracted Pattison to the events of 1922. Because in the dialogues Pattison creates between Collins, and Republican go-between Crowley, are all the issues of national identity, self-determination, decision-making - and degrees of trust in those who make the decisions at the highest level - that have been running through our own approach to the referendum on Scottish independence. There's no partisan bias in Pattison's dynamic short play - directed with unfussy briskness by Liz Carruthers - but there is a profound, and poignant sense of how good intentions cannot guarantee anything. And John Kielty's Collins - full of tinderbox passion that sparks as readily into dry humour as it does into angry denunciations of the opposition's tactics - is cogently aware of how vehement idealists don't necessarily make the most useful negotiators. George Docherty's sober-suited Crowley is cunning incarnate: superficially affable but wily with an edge of menace - as the hapless note-taking McPeak (Gavin Wright) discovers in the wake of Collins' death. Another moment that changed history: almost a century on it still resonates.

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