Out at the pub for a few pints on a Friday night in Northern Ireland, Bobby and Dave aren’t especially looking for female company.
They both have wives back at home in England, though that hasn’t stopped them from cheating before. More relevant is that they have no moves, no repertoire of flirt or banter. Still, they draw the notice of two teasingly sharp-tongued young women across the room. Little do the guys know that these beauties — both hairdressers, they say — are on a mission, and it isn’t about hooking up.
The hunted have a habit of believing they are the hunters in “The Honey Trap,” Leo McGann’s new thriller at Irish Repertory Theater. It is 1979, and Bobby (Harrison Tipping) and Dave (Daniel Marconi) are British soldiers deployed on a four-month tour amid the lethal sectarian violence of the Troubles. From behind their riot shields, they have felt, in the bricks and bottles thrown at them, the hatred of locals who don’t want the British there.
If the pub were in a Catholic area, maybe they would be more cautious. But this is Protestant territory, near their barracks outside Belfast, and their guards are down. Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski) and Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon), who work for the Irish Republican Army, easily feign a romantic interest — just grudging enough to make them appear a challenge.
“So,” Lisa needles Dave once they’ve swayed to a song together, “you might be the worst dancing Englishman I’ve ever met. But you can drink. So that’s something.”
Bobby, who at 21 is a wide-eyed naïf, will go home with the women and be murdered. Dave, his swaggering superior at 24, will identify Bobby’s corpse the next day. Over the decades that follow, Dave will be tormented by having fallen for Lisa and Kirsty’s charade, and by having let Bobby die. The indignity of being bested by women is eternal fuel to Dave’s everlasting rage.
Directed by Matt Torney, a Belfast native, “The Honey Trap” begins with a middle-aged Dave (Michael Hayden), still a tough guy, recalling that long-ago night to Emily (Molly Ranson), an Irish American graduate student conducting oral-history interviews. In flashbacks, we see Dave’s unreliable memories play out, distorted by guilt and vanity. What’s constant, and true, is his hunger for revenge.
To that end, he is not above misusing Emily and her closely guarded research to find out anything he can about the people who slaughtered Bobby — information she appears to have learned that he has never known. Of the several directly responsible, most are dead, but one remains: a woman named Sonia (Samantha Mathis) who is about Dave’s age, and who now owns a coffee shop in South Belfast. With that intel in hand, off he goes to set his own honey trap, showing up there with a false name and an invented back story.
McGann, who grew up in Belfast and has lived in both England and the United States, is interested in the complicity in violence of people on all sides of the Troubles. That includes people on this side of the Atlantic, where the I.R.A. tapped the Irish diaspora for contributions.
“Irish Americans,” Dave tells Emily. “Boston. That’s where the gun they used to kill Bobby came from.”
The play’s more melancholy subject is the emotional scar tissue of the conflict’s survivors. Filtered through Dave’s memories, the outcome of the night in the pub glimmers as a particularly needless waste — because on some level, the four 20-somethings were enjoying one another. What if they hadn’t been enemies?
The same goes for the revenge trap that Dave, soul-warped in the 21st century, sets for Sonia, with whom he shares a crackling rom-com energy. Too bad about the mortal stakes. They might have made a fun pair.
In Torney’s staging, Charlie Corcoran’s set and Michael Gottlieb’s lighting neatly accommodate the layering of past and present. The cast is strong, particularly Tipping, whose Bobby is so wet behind the ears that you want to protect him from his own sweet gullibility.
Act I sags slightly in the interview portions, and the script requires Emily to erupt at Dave in a way that feels disproportionate, but that’s it for quibbles.
Otherwise, this is taut, suspenseful storytelling, the kind that leaves an audience rapt — and dabbles in deception until the very last line.
The Honey Trap
Through Nov. 9 at Irish Repertory Theater, Manhattan; irishrep.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.
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