Off-Broadway Review: “Belfast Blues” – Part of Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2020 Digital Fall Series of “A Performance on Screen”

Off-Broadway Review: “Belfast Blues” – Part of Irish Repertory Theatre’s 2020 Digital Fall Season Series of “A Performance on Screen”
Written and Performed by Geraldine Hughes
Stage Production Directed by Carol Kane
Filmed at Lyric Theatre, Belfast
Reviewed by David Roberts
Theatre Reviews Limited

After years of touring and multiple performances in New York City, Geraldine Hughes’s autobiographical “Belfast Blues” is currently playing at Irish Repertory Theatre – virtually – as the first performance in the Theatre’s online 2020 season. Filmed at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in 2019 where it was directed by Carol Kane, “Belfast Blues” chronicles Ms. Hughes’s childhood survival of and eventual exit from Ireland’s Troubles in the 1980s when the battles between Ireland’s Catholics and Protestants sent bullets flying through the walls of the young girl’s home.

The Troubles broke out in Ireland in 1969 and steadfastly remain into the country’s present. Geraldine Hughes’s performance demonstrates the fear and the deep sadness of her young self as she claws through the danger that surrounds her daily both inside and out of her closet “safe space.” Ms. Hughes uses the full arsenal of ethos, pathos, and logos to bring her childhood memories to vivid reality that draws her audience into her fragile world of survival.

Although drenched in melancholy, “Belfast Blues” also shares moments of humor as Ms. Hughes introduces her family and friends “Constantly blinking Eddie” and Ms. Hughes’s awful next-door neighbor “Margaret” are enlivened by the actor’s remarkable use of physicality and voice to define those characters as well as the other twenty-four that appear in her story as she comes to terms with her Divis Flats existence.

Director Carol Kane gives Geraldine Hughes the space she needs to tell her story with authenticity and stark believability. Jonathan Christman’s set and lighting design and Jonathan Snipes’s sound design draw us close to young Geraldine’s journey from Belfast to America.

As one watches her story of a divided nation riddled by conflict and deep mistrust, it is impossible not to be emotionally entrenched in America’s current “troubles” that also seem to have no end.