I’m quite familiar with Shadow of a Gunman. I’ve read the play several times over the course of the last few years and seen a production produced by Kimberley Lynne at an Irish Heritage Festival back home in Baltimore. Which is why I was so impressed that the production that our group saw at the Abbey Theatre on Saturday night was able to so thoroughly surprise me. This was largely thanks to the productions overall effort to make the themes, the characters, and the physicality of the play bigger than what one typically expects of a piece of such historical significance.

Take Donal Davoren, the main character of the piece who encourages the misconception among his new tenant home neighbors that he is an IRA gunman on the run. In the text, Davoren is a creep, a coward, and a predatory manipulator, but this often glossed over; because he is such a passive character in the story and the other characters are so personable, his character is often flattened. But the Abbey production made several key choices to heighten the character, casting an actor that appears older than what I expected to heighten the creepiness of his manipulative pursuit of Minnie Powell, having the actor frantically scurrying across the stage to highlight his cowardice, and introducing a sort of mania to the character’s speech and physical delivery, who must have gone through some traumatic horror to turn to the station he finds himself in now. All of this contributed to a new realness for the character and for the play that was bigger than expected, but not garish, and that positively contributed to conveying the characters and themes of the text.

Excellent show. 10/10, would watch again.