Recent historical research has pointed up many sobering parallels between 1798 and today, in terms of the sectarian mosaic and political gridlock within Northern Ireland. Gary Mitchell put it bluntly enough in his play, Tearing the Loom, at the Lyric last year, but I doubt that in all the splurge of recent 1798 literature, there has been a weirder take on it than Armagh-born Daragh Carville's new play, Observatory, which opens at the Peacock this week.
It's a time-travel fantasy which blurs a few notions from quantum physics - and indeed local history - to tell the tale of how a "quantum fissure" allows a young woman to live a double life: as both a contemporary turn-of-the-millennium astronomer, and as the niece of the Anglican chief astronomer at Armagh, James Archibald Hamilton, in 1799. In another twist, her lover of today, a local historian who helps her nose out the murky betrayals of the past, assists her in protecting her other lover from the past. The latter, the laudanum-addicted Robert Hogg, is the key historical figure who provided Carville with his initial inspiration for the play.
"When I began researching into the observatory archives, I became fascinated that the man was a scientist, a Presbyterian minister and a United Irishman. I'm just very interested in that juncture of ideas - of how a man of science can be a man of God, as much as the political backdrop."
The play is entirely set in the observatory - with its equatorial dome, Troughton telescope and transit room (from where Hamilton and Hogg observed a transit of Mercury), and latches onto a "tradition" in the observatory of a suicided ghost (that of an astronomer called Davenport from the early 1800s). Carville's rapid, hard-hitting dialogue first surfaced when the Belfast company Tinderbox picked up his first play, Language Roulette, toured Ireland with it and brought it to the prestigious little Bush theatre in London. It was a hilarious, if disturbingly nihilistic portrait of twenty-something drug-frenzied nihilism in Belfast, in the wake of the 1994 cease-fires. His second play, Dumped, again mounted by Tinderbox, was in a similar vein - as Carville almost dismissively puts it now, "young people being witty with each other".
But Carville's new play, written last year, is a radical departure, and a brave one in terms of the many ideas and issues it raises. Interestingly, it is directed by Dublin director, Jason Byrne, of Loose Canon, well known for his gutsy productions of Elizabethan dramas.
When I asked Byrne about some of the difficult time-shifts within the play, he says: "These are all done theatrically. After all, no one asks questions in Shakespeare when in the middle of a scene, a character turns to the audience and does an aside that turns into a soliloquy. That's quantum physics as far as I'm concerned."
The cast includes Charlie Bonner, Ronan Leahy, Des Cave and Mary O'Driscoll.
Observatory previews at the Peacock from tonight until Tuesday and opens on Wednesday, at 8.15 p.m., until May 1st