Review: The Man who Swallowed a Dictionary

The Man who Swallowed a Dictionary, the biog play about David Irvine, is now sharp as f***, to quote the woman seated next to me in The Lyric Theatre. Or to be more exact, and politer, as the famed vocabulary of the boy from the Shankill who made it big and helped change the course of Northern Ireland towards peace.

Robert Bobby Niblock’s play is beautifully written, and the one man show (at times show off) is superbly acted by Paul Garrett. Apparently Irvine's widow Jeanette gave the actor her husband's tie so he could get into character. Which he does....

Whatever had helped him, Garrett inhabited this engaging, clever, complex individual.

There were laughs in what is a pretty serious narrative. One came with young Irvine’s birth. His father, a socialist whose beliefs influenced the boy later, runs to witness his new baby., Asking what kind it is, boy or girl, he gets the East Belfast answer ‘It’s definitely a Protestant’!

The set is, inevitably, a big book and David Irvine certainly knows some big words it contains. On television, he famously used his polymath status to good effect and also as a consummate politician. The price the man paid, however, in terms of health and family impact was high. We sensed the strain as well as the pride in Garrett’s performance and under Matthew McElhinney’s super skilful direction. When (spoiler alert), the young grandad, only 36 when his son impregnated a local Catholic girl, loses in effect his second son, Mark, to suicide, the play becomes almost unbearable to watch. Great acting here again. Another sequence that provided a kind of master class in biographical representation was the scene in which Garrett plays both husband and wife, with Jeanette bearing the brunt of her husband's imprisonment affter he transported a bomb for the UVF across town only to be intercepted by the police. In prison, and this sequence echoed Martin Lynch's excellent Chronicles of Long Kesh, there was discipline under the godfather, Mr Spence who dispensed wisdom and recommended as not light reading The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist.

It was interesting to gain a sense of the Good Friday Agreement from Irvine’s point of view as in Owen McCafferty’s magisterial play Agreement, another adornment of the Lyric season, he doesn’t figure. Yet his actions were important preparation and he cleverly recognised the importance of an American mediator, Gerorge Mitchell.

If Irvine didn’t make it to elder statesman, dying at just 53, he was definitely a statesman, recognised on all sides of the divide for his contribution to the new, more progressive Northern Ireland. And this theatrical tribute does him justice.

Jane Hardy