Ruth Leon’s Pocket Theatre Review: The Honey Trap – Irish Repertory Theatre

The Troubles’, the eternal war between the Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland, casts a long shadow. For some, the horrors remain indelible for a lifetime.

Such as one is Dave (Michael Hayden), who, with his friend, naïve Bobby (Harrison Tipping), were young British soldiers sent to ‘keep the peace’ between the ‘Proddies’ and the IRA in the Belfast of 1979. The two go out for a drink one evening at a pub near their barracks and meet two pretty girls. They’re a long way from home and the girls seem welcoming in this alien place where the Brits are hated by the participants on all sides. Dave decides to return to the barracks, insisting that Bobby stays to have a good time. But the girls are IRA plants, there to entrap the ‘enemy’. Bobby is murdered that night.

Dave has never got over the guilt of having left his friend and, perhaps a greater shame still, of having been bested by girls. Decades later, he returns to Northern Ireland, determined to find the IRA gunmen who killed Bobby. Dave’s rage and guilt hasn’t abated even though they are all dead except for one of the girls, now owner of a café in Belfast.

The Honey Trap is a searing reminder of how ‘The Troubles’, and by extension every longterm partisan conflict, can simmer forever, flaring occasionally into the fire of vengeance.  Written by  Belfast playwright Leo McGann.

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