The Homecoming of Joseph Grace review – poignant story of a life unmoored by war and exile

Marina Market, CorkMichael Glenn Murphy is the accidental soldier and reluctant revolutionary reckoning with his past in Deirdre Kinahan’s touching drama of regret and return A ferry terminal in steely morning light is the bare setting for Deirdre Kinahan’s poignant drama of return, as a man (Michael Glenn Murphy) in overcoat, suit and hat clutches a suitcase and considers his next move. In the 50 years since he left Ireland on a misguided impulse, Joseph Grace has never been back until now. As a bus pulls up, he hesitates and turns away, assailed by memories. What follows in Louise Lowe’s atmospheric staging for Once Off Productions is a reckoning with Joseph’s past: a life swept up in 20th-century Europe’s upheavals, from the Western Front, to Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade of war prisoners in Germany in 1915, to the rise of Hitler. Kinahan has previously dramatised the Irish revolutionary years, deploying archival sources to gripping effect. Here she writes acutely about complex loyalties among Irishmen serving in the British army in the first world war, but the historical research is less well absorbed overall. Joseph’s years in Weimar Berlin are not fully convinc