●●●●●

Double Cross was written by Thomas Kilroy and directed by Jimmy Fay.  The play was premiered in 1986 by Field Day Theatre Company, and recently produced by the Abbey Theatre and Lyric Theatre, Belfast. This play is about the double: Brendan Bracken (from Tipperary) and William Joyce (from Galway) who were astonishingly played by Ian Toner. The actor playing both characters reinforces the concepts of duality and individual crisis and identity. As well as national identity, both Irish and British which can be intertwined with the contemporary Brexit topic. Interestingly, the production ran in Dublin, and Belfast—would there be any subtle messages underneath? Kilroy went through BBC archives and listened to Bracken’s and Joyce’s speeches during the elaboration of his play which demonstrates the playwrights ambition to spread the word to a vast audience. These themes reflect on our contemporary society, as Jimmy Fay writes, “Partly because the time is ripe to use a play of such inquisitiveness on the nature of identity and political extremity to examine our own dark times.”

The audience learned how Brendan Bracken was haunted by the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw, William Joyce. Ian Toner’s performance was incredibly captivating, his psychological suffering onstage was so vivid and hard to watch. Bracken was suffocated in this claustrophobic world of propaganda and war. Toner also played Joyce at the end of the war who takes over the radio, one of the most important mediums of mass communication at the time, and he is also haunted by the failure of his Nazi ideology.

The set, lighting, sound, video designers (Ciaran Bagnall, Paul Keogan, Chris Warner and Neil O’Driscoll, respectively) supported the idea of the play to its maximum standard. The designers used different dimensions, sound, videos, and with the well-crafted mixture of all these techniques the ensemble created a fantastic production.