The play to watch if your country is breaking up

Of all the West End’s unloved venues the loveliest is the Arts Theatre. It specialises in creaky off-beat plays like Only Our Own by Ann Henning Jocelyn. We’re in Connemara, in the west of Ireland, in the early 1990s. A family of Anglo–Irish toffs are struggling to cope with their status as universal pariahs. Wherever they go they’re out of place. Catholic Ireland resents them. In England, their spiritual home, they feel like aliens. Titania, a narky teenager, is baffled by her parents’ religious prejudices and she merrily announces her involvement with a boozy local bumpkin. He’s Catholic, naturally. This prompts a bombshell of a speech from Titania’s grandmother, Lady Eliza, who witnessed a village insurrection in 1922 when she was just 11. A gang of rebels axed their way through the main doors of the mansion at midnight. They decapitated her Pekingese with a shovel, shot her brother in the face, irrigated the floors with petrol (‘our petrol from our garage’), and turned the gilded fuse into a fireball. The killer detail is that she knew them all by sight. They were locals who visited the house every Christmas for mince pies and a tumbler of his lordship’s sherry.

Countries with a recent history of sectarianism would flock to see this play

Only Our Own Photo: Ludovic des Cognets

This understated and immensely powerful speech sets the tone for a play whose stately rhythm and unshowy manner are deceptive. It tackles a huge theme with dynamic artistry: the long feud between Catholics and Protestants over 90 years. We watch as insane violence evolves into passive, uneventful loathing, and then into tentative friendship and finally into openness and reconciliation. Countries with a recent history of sectarianism would flock to see this play. In London it lacks immediacy because at the moment we seem to be getting along all right, fingers crossed.