The Man Who Swallowed A Dictionary (Green Shoot Productions at Lyric Theatre until 10 September + NI tour)

Robert Niblock’s new play about the life of David Ervine follows the east Belfast man from cradle to grave. As the title suggests, it riffs off Ervine’s fabled wordiness and uses a neat device to pause and reflect on the definition of various words, sometimes leaving it to the audience to put two and two together, sometimes getting in a round of laughs, like the light-hearted examples of ‘polarity’.

The Man Who Swallowed A Dictionary quickly reveals Ervine’s mother’s fervour for Paisley, and his dad’s more secular and left wing leanings towards the Northern Ireland Labour Party. He falls in love with Jeanette. But deadly days like Bloody Friday also push him towards making a life-changing commitment to a paramilitary organisation. Mates Bo and Junior follow him through the drama of his adolescence, into the UVF, in and out of prison, and are still knocking about the east Belfast bar when he becomes a politician, leading the Progressive Unionist Party.

Actor Paul Garrett is a great fit for the role, a skilled mimic – he has Rev Chris Hudson’s accent down a tee – and at a distance visually similar to Ervine, balding with a bushy moustache and attired in a dark grey suit, tie and pipe.

David Craig’s set is simple but hefty: two enormous open books over which Garrett clambers. While it’s a great three-level playground providing height and good places to sit, the amount of movement in some of the shorter scenes tends to distract. The script is replete with zinging one-liners, working class and sometimes loyalist retorts that wouldn’t have gone amiss in the Dundonald Liberation Army parody plays that this show’s director Matthew McElhinney stars in.

The words and influence of Gusty Spence – who renounced violence while incarcerated – are also significant to the story and add to the play’s authenticity. While in Long Kesh, Ervine was challenged by Spence’s logic that republicans needed to be understood and that ultimately progress would come from dialogue rather than conflict. The UVF’s murderous attack at Loughinisland is condemned on stage by Ervine, but it’s a point of contention in nearly every Troubles drama whether enough emphasis is given to acknowledging the bloody deeds of paramilitary organisations before praising their political representatives’ pursuit of peace. The script does highlight the military and political differences between the UVF and PUP in the years before the 1994 loyalist ceasefire. Lives were undoubtedly saved, though many lives were also needlessly cut short.

The Man Who Swallowed A Dictionary is an interesting companion piece to Owen McCafferty’s Agreement which ran on the same Lyric stage throughout April. That seven-handed play largely ignored the role of the smaller political parties in the talks that led to the Belfast Agreement.

This new play has real heart and a lot of potential. It’s unusual to be invited to review what was almost a preview performance on Monday, its first night in front of a paying audience. A disco soundtrack somewhat over-powers the description of the plenary session called by Senator George Mitchell at the conclusion of the talks in Stormont’s Castle Buildings. And the constant walking around the pile of books can leave the actor in the shade. But the rough edges should be smoothed off within a couple of performances.

The show’s sucker punch comes towards the end of the second act when personal tragedy hits the Ervine family. Less than three years later David Ervine himself is dead. Tributes at the time by the UUP’s Reg Empey described him as “a unique, charismatic and uncharacteristically spin-free politician” while the SDLP’s Mark Durkan said that “David emerged from a paramilitary past to pursue a peaceful future”. Hearing Ervine’s own words played at the end of the play is a powerful reminder of how keenly his absence has been felt from Northern Ireland politics over the last 16 years, particularly with the constipated process of standing down paramilitary structures.

The Man Who Swallowed A Dictionary is playing at the Lyric Theatre until 10 September, before touring through Larne, east Belfast, Downpatrick, Coalisland, Newry, Ballymena, Lisburn, Newtownabbey and Derry. Say a little prayer for the set builders ...

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