By Steve Stockman
Big congratulations to Nuala McKeever for her big success at this year’s IMRO Radio Awards. Nuala won GOLD in the Best Drama for her play Truth, Love or Promise. She performed the play at this year’s 4 Corner’s Festival. We are chuffed. I am chuffed. I am sure Nuala is chuffed too. Well done young lady!
Here’s my review from August 2024…
Truth, Love Or Promise – mesmeric in tale, clever in script, convincing in acting, poignant in subject matter and laugh out loud throughout. I want all my friends to see it.
Nuala McKeever is so much more a funny woman. This one woman show is of she has taken a stand up comedy routine and given it the format of a play because this is a drama than a comedy.
Reviews have seen critics drop names like Dickens, Shakespeare and O’Casey. Of these the latter rings truest for me. A northern Irish Sean O’Casey, making the personal and societal issues of the place onto a theatre stage.
McKeever has conjured a story around a Creative Writing Class where three women from different backgrounds are thrown together, sometimes against their very will. As the class goes on through winter into spring Maureen, Brenda and Joanna become friends and we are totally gripped as their stories open up.
Our favourite comedian shows her acting chops as she herself plays all three of our women. Her side step back and forward between chairs to shift accents is almost a circus piece in itself as with humour and pathos and at times great speed she interweaves their conversations.
Very quickly McKeever’s voice had me distinguish each character. It was as if there were actually three actors up there but I think the play would have lost something if there had been. Quite the skill Ms McKeever.
So around, below and on top of this plot, humour and very quick voice changes (how did she do that!) McKeever opens up the issues. Prejudice, gender, The Troubles and grief. There’s a lot of grief. That grief takes in the personal loss of all three women but also the united trauma of our post Troubles society.
We are watching, laughing and struck to poignant silence by a grief that McKeever describes like she knows it; heavy and deep. Yet, there is a message of a hope that bursts through like the flowers that finally grow out of a lump of mud that Maureen watches change over the seasons as she sits in a park before the class.
Under everything, something is going on. After searing loss the great big universe keeps me. In the midst of those dying around us, life defies.
Truth, Love Or Promise ultimately tells us that stories can help us find that. The truth about how we feel. Our empty page of denial covered with catharsis. The play also tells us that we have a choice about the story that we tell about our circumstances and where we take our stories from now.
It is not lost on me that we are watching this a few days before we commemorate 30 years since the IRA Ceasefire. Oh have we stories to tell and continue to write.
Tonight one woman with the gifts of the gab, hilarity, literary invention and acting stopped me in my tracks more than once. At the end I just sat trying to take it all in and as we left for home I thought that it does always rain here BUT we can change the story by putting our hoods up.
Steve Stockman