Paddy: The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong – a well-crafted and brilliantly performed study of a man who was caught in a miscarriage of justice (Wooden Bridge Productions at Lyric Theatre until Sunday 13 September)

Actor Don Wycherley’s eyes dart across the audience and if he delivers a line staring at you, it’s as if your soul is being interrogated. Walking around the stage in this one man show, Wycherley is as comfortable with the complex pattern of the script as the character Paddy Armstrong is cozy in his nursing home dressing gown.

It’s a genuine tour de force by Wycherley (who played local Irish language newspaper editor Rob Cullan in Scúp) as he imagines Armstrong in old age, living in a foggy world where words start to disappear between his brain and his tongue, uttering a chain of recollections that switch mid-sentence from one thing to t’other. Even before the tale of coerced confessions and unsafe convictions has begun, the audience are collectively rivetted by the actor’s characterisation, shuffling around the stage, switching accents, pulling faces and running in slow motion.

Paddy: The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong is no random selection of anecdotes from an autobiography (written with Mary-Elaine Tynan). Tynan together with Wycherley and Niamh Gleeson have crafted a 75-minute narrative that circles around but still gently moves forward in time.

So early on we get a sense of how young Armstrong was when he became hooked on gambling. The local priest suggested Armstrong would be safer living in England away from the Troubles. How Armstrong met Carole Richardson and lived together in a squat. Soon we’ve jumped forward to Armstrong’s interrogation in 1974 and how torture fed into the capture of his so-called confession. Then it’s 1975 and we’re in court as Armstrong is given a life sentence and the judge remarks that he wishes they had been indicted for high treason, which still carried the death penalty. Behind bars in HMP Wormwood Scrubs and HMP Hull the threat has swapped from bent coppers to bent screws and menacing prisoners.

Armstrong was arrested along with two other men (Paul Hill and Gerry Conlon) and a woman (Carole Richardson) – the Guildford Four – and accused of planting bombs in Guildford pubs frequented by British Army personnel. On the evening of 5 October 1974, explosions killed four soldiers and one civilian, with a further 65 people wounded. A couple of years later, members of the IRA’s Balcombe Street Gang would admit responsibility for the Guildford pub bombings, confessions that were suppressed by the Director of Public Prosecutions. (A line in the play almost casually remembers “the man I’m doing time for shakes my hand and walks off, leaving me [in the prison wing]”.)

The Guildford Four’s convictions were eventually quashed in October 1989 and a subsequent inquiry criticised the trial judge. Solicitor Alistair Logan commented that “four people spent 15 years in jail for an offence they didn’t commit and no one really knows after reading that report why that happened”.

Music and sound effects pepper the action. Wycherley’s timing synchronises key lines of dialogue with moments in songs, though the fast fades are very abrupt and a more complicated sound design might have extended some low-level sound effects to match the lighting states that accompany scenes (like those played out in prison).

Paddy: The Life and Times of Paddy Armstrong doesn’t overly dwell on the what if questions, but instead explores how Paddy Armstrong’s life and personality persevered despite – or in spite of – attempts to derail it. You can catch it on the Lyric Theatre’s main stage until Sunday 13 September (there’s a Q&A with Paddy Armstrong and Audrey Carville after the Saturday matinee) before heading back to Clontarf and the Liverpool Irish Festival in October. There are also opportunities to catch it in Derry (26 February) and Cookstown (13 March) next year.

Photo credit: Ciaran Dolan

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