Review: This is Paradise

There is a nice idea at the heart of Northern Ireland-born, Glasgow-based producer-turned-playwright Michael John O’Neill’s new monologue This is Paradise – to elide one woman’s journey through a difficult, dysfunctional relationship with his home country’s difficult, dysfunctional progress through the peace process.

Set over the weekend of the Good Friday Agreement, it follows 30-something Kate – a raw, pained performance from Amy Molloy – as she attempts to find out what has become of her ex-lover, the much older, much wilder Diver. O’Neill’s narrative hops backwards and forwards in time to tell the story of their intertwined lives, becoming increasingly dream-like as it develops.

There is a lot that works – the overall concept is compelling, as is Molloy, as is Lulu Tam’s stark set, a great slab of concrete, cracked and bleeding on a jet black floor. There is a lot that doesn’t, though, too.

O’Neill’s script is showily overwrought, frustratingly decontextualised, and overlong – it could easily lose twenty of its eighty minutes – and Katherine Nesbitt’s direction is far too static and stuck. There is something disappointing, too, about a female character entirely defined by the men in her life. Amid Diver, her dad, and her husband, there is barely room for Kate in this story.

This is Paradise premiered online last year and went on to win the £3000 Popcorn Writing Prize to secure its place in the Traverse Theatre’s festival programme. To be brutally honest, it doesn’t really belong there.