REVIEW: Derry Boys by Niall McCarthy at Theatre503 until 7 June 2025
'witty, heartfelt play with a strong cast' ★★★ ½
This is a play that starts with a handshake. Just two lads, Paddy (Eoin Sweeney) and Mick (Matthew Blaney)—old chums, ride or die. The type of mates who, if this were ‘Derry Girls’ rather than ‘Derry Boys’, might have scrawled ‘P+M 4 Ever’ on the school walls. Derry Boys follows them across two decades, from puberty-fuelled shenanigans to the bleak realities of an adulthood that has taken them down very different paths.
At its heart, Derry Boys is about feeling out of joint: not quite belonging, not quite right, living in a world that doesn't know where to put you. The two leads are born in Derry—or Londonderry. Depends on who you ask. A place so torn between identities it can't even settle on a name for itself. The boys feel this keenly. ‘I care that I'm Irish’, one of them says. ‘And I care that there are people out there who can tell me that I'm not.’ They burn with resentment for past injustice, and for everything their fellow Irish still don't have. They dream of following in the IRA's footsteps. Maybe if they blow up the right thing—or person—they can solve it all.
Derry Boys is at its best when it mixes keen observation with some very funny lines. Writer Niall McCarthy was adamant about avoiding stereotypes: ‘I’ve also seen A LOT of really terrible plays about Irish people written by English people’, he said in an interview. He wanted to create something different, a piece authentically rooted in its setting. Without question, he's achieved that. Knowing laughter rippled through the audience at each Derry-specific line. A Derry resident I spoke to afterwards said that the show had nailed it all, from the Protestant/Catholic school segregation down to the Derry City vs. Celtic jerseys hanging in the foyer.
But a storyline that mixes scenes of heartwarming friendship with a semi-satirical plotline about terrorism will always have a hell of a tonal challenge ahead of it. Derry Boys is at its weakest when it doesn't trust the audience, when it spells its message out too much: ‘We shouldn't be trying to make things worse for the English, we should be trying to make things better for the Irish’, one character earnestly says. It is Paddy's girlfriend Aoife (Catherine Rees) who draws the short straw here, as she is almost always relegated to being the voice of reason, the sensible woman who scolds her boyfriend to please just grow up. Rees plays her well and sympathetically, but it's clear that McCarthy is interested in his duo, not a trio. She's there to make a political statement, and to raise the stakes for Paddy. At one point, when Paddy was wavering between life options, I wondered whether the show was going to make her pregnant. It did.
All of that is to say that there are some formulaic structures on display here, well-known to anyone who's watched coming-of-age sagas before. The more the production went on, the more I yearned for it to shake things up and (without giving spoilers) it ultimately does, in a big way. I would just like to have been a little more surprised on the road we took to get there.
None of that changes, however, that this is a witty, heartfelt play with a strong cast. (Watching Blaney's frantic interpretation of the hellish gawkiness of puberty is almost worth the cost of admission alone.) You'll come out thinking—and desperately hoping nobody asks you which side of the ‘Derry’ vs. ‘Londonderry’ divide you're on.
Images: Harry Elleston
Derry Boys by Niall McCarthy at Theatre503 20 May – 7 June
BOX OFFICE https://theatre503.com/whats-on/derry-boys/
Cast
MICK Matthew Blaney
PADDY Eoin Sweeney
AOIFE Catherine Rees
Creative Team
WRITER Niall McCarthy
DIRECTOR Andy McLeod
PRODUCER Iona Bremner
SET AND COSTUME DESIGNER Caitlin Abbott
LIGHTING DESIGNER Jodi Rabinowitz
SOUND DESIGNER Rudy Percival
STAGE MANAGER Tricia Wey
PRODUCTION MANAGER Herbe Walmsley
MOVEMENT DIRECTOR Emily Orne
