Theater review by Marcus Scott
History is never inert, as the Belfast playwright Leo McGann reminds us in The Honey Trap: It metastasizes across decades, reshaping itself through recollection, omission and remorse. In McGann’s unnerving and meticulously crafted political thriller, what begins as a deceptively simple interview between a graduate student and a veteran soldier unfolds into a labyrinthine meditation on the perilous seductions of remembrance.
Emily (Molly Ranson), an Irish-American PhD candidate compiling oral histories of the Troubles, meets Dave (Michael Hayden), a British military veteran formerly stationed in Northern Ireland. With academic equanimity, dictaphone in hand, Emily is intent on recording his story in pursuit of truth and reconciliation—which, she argues, Northern Ireland has never fully embraced, leaving old wounds to fester. Dave, gruff and cagey, counters that only his account is the truth, because the IRA is incapable of it.
The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg
Flashback to Belfast, 1979: Young Dave (Daniel Marconi), brimming with mercurial mischief, stumbles through boisterous drinking games with his affable comrade Bobby (Harrison Tipping). Two local women—Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski)—enter the bar, the young men dial up the flirtation and a night of bawdy comedy spirals into catastrophe: Bobby is lured away and murdered, leaving Dave seared with lifelong guilt. More than three decades later, Dave revisits that night through Emily’s project; details fracture, motives shift and testimony mutates into obsession. Dave can’t rest without answers—and retribution.
The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg
The second act veers into unexpected terrain, shading into romantic drama. Adopting the alias “Charlie,” Dave pursues Sonia (a radiant Samantha Mathis), a café owner who may hold the key to unlocking the past. These sequences flirt with melodrama, but under Matt Torney’s brisk, tightly calibrated direction, they reveal the psychic costs of repression; Dave’s duplicity is bound up in the pathology of a man devoured by secrets he can neither confess nor escape. The Honey Trap impresses not only as a thriller but also as a philosophical inquiry. The characters are rendered with psychological acuity; the dialogue bristles with rhythm and bite; the architecture is at once taut and expansive. Without didacticism, it weaves together questions of generational divides, the dream of a united Ireland, the complicity of American sympathizers in sustaining the IRA and the dark calculus of violence as an instrument of change.
The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg
The company meets McGann’s ambitions head-on, navigating the play’s tonal shifts with dexterity. Hayden delivers a formidable slow-burn performance, embodying both the corrosive weight of survivor’s guilt and the volatile charm of a man unmoored. Marconi captures Young Dave’s reckless exuberance, while Tipping imbues Bobby with tragic innocence. Ranson’s Emily, all scholarly poise and simmering defensiveness, anchors the play, and Mathis lends Sonia a beguiling opacity that keeps the audience off-balance. Charlie Corcoran’s mutable set shifts from pub to café to bedroom with unshowy precision; Michael Gottlieb’s lighting oscillates between dreamlike reverie and harsh interrogation, while James Garver’s sound design steeps the action in period verisimilitude, underscored by disembodied Irish voices recounting lived experience of the Troubles.
Although a late expository monologue leaches some momentum, The Honey Trap comes together with devastating force in its final moments. This is theatre as historical inquiry and psychological autopsy; a reminder that while 1998’s Good Friday Agreement may have ended the violence in Ireland, the inner wars rage on. The play is less interested in resolving a cold case than in exposing how history itself is a honey trap: luring us with promises of clarity, only to ensnare us in contradictions, evasions and irreconcilable truths.
The Honey Trap. Irish Repertory Theatre (Off Broadway). By Leo McGann. Directed by Matt Torney. With Michael Hayden, Samantha Mathis, Molly Ranson, Daniel Marconi, Harrison Tipping, Doireann Mac Mahon, Annabelle Zasowskiulia. Running time: 2hrs 20mins. One intermission.
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The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg
