The Witness

Rex Ryan in The Witness. Image by Kate Glynn

*****

Rex Ryan likes crime. Which is not to accuse him of committing any, just to recognise his proclivity towards stories of true-life Irish crime. He also enjoys one-man shows in which he directs himself. The triple threat of writer, performer, and director once again looking at the Dublin criminal landscape from the late nineties in his latest offering The Witness. Based on Nicola Tallant’s book, The Witness: The Story of Joey The Lips O’Callaghan, Ryan's The Witness charts O’Callaghan’s journey from twelve-year-old drug runner to being the youngest person to enter the Irish witness protection programme. Turning State’s evidence against killers Brian Kenny and Thomas Hinchon in 2005. The Witness, unlike Ryan’s previous venture into gangland Dublin, The Monk, finds him several steps removed from the original source material. The distance creating narrative itches that never get scratched. Yet if, at times, we seem to be getting further from the story, it’s only to bring us closer to the truth. A truth as harrowing as it is visceral, in a production that delivers with the explosive impact of a pipe bomb.

Like A Bronx Tale, Ryan’s story charts a young boy’s descent into a world of crime. A life he wasn’t trained into so much as groomed for at a very young age, with all that the word implies. The fastest runner in Ballymun at six years old, Joey believes his new life in Blanchardstown has taken a turn for the better when Brian, the father-figure milkman, offers him a job. And a new nickname: The Lips. Joey graduating to making special deliveries wherein Brian reveals himself as a skilled manipulator and a violent and dangerous abuser. Toying with Joey’s immature affections whilst beating and sexually abusing him. Joey resorting to a drug-fuelled numbing just to block out what he cannot un-see. A turning point arriving when asked to commit murder, forcing him into an impossible choice.

Rex Ryan in The Witness. Image by Kate Glynn

Harrowing and horrifying, The Witness demystifies the popular prejudice of all young drug dealers as skangers. Rather, it presents neglected and abused children, like Joey, often absent a romanticised father and living with a romanticised mother whose boyfriends smack their head off the table. A world in which a child learns to do what it needs to do to survive. Their only escape being into drugs, or into selling drugs. And that’s not even the worst part. That would be the manner in which the child’s core decency is abused, along with their minds and bodies. Speaking to an evil that divests the gangland criminal of any romanticised veneer. Male rape used to dominate those too young to know what’s happening to them often becoming a case of history repeating itself.

As with any historical account, facts can often get in the way of a good story. Or rather the weighting of facts, with some given undue attention whilst others get skimmed past. Like Joey’s own child and partner, barely mentioned, leaving you feeling you haven’t been given the full story. Yet if Ryan’s script overplays certain details, it’s often for structural effect. Like the use of rhyming couplets peppered throughout giving a head nod to Howie The Rookie. Words often foreshadowing what’s to come and setting up a final-moment reversal. Yet if narrative omissions mean the final catharsis isn’t quite as powerful, not to worry. What Ryan doesn’t put down on the page, he reveals up on the stage in a brutally honest performance.

Rex Ryan in The Witness. Image by Kate Glynn

Throughout, Ryan’s mercurial character study is as much an acting masterclass as it is a study of the body as a site of trauma. First impressions being of a hollowed man with heroin cheekbones, a ghost here but not here. Miglė Ryan’s shabby, dirt-stained tracksuit, with the logo peeling away, a costumed testament to a man at the end of his rope. But it’s the eyes that get you. What’s behind the eyes, on the eyes, in front of the eyes which glance across the audience like a lighthouse's searching beam. Challenging you, pleading with you, glaring at you in no uncertain terms as you're told to switch off your phone (yes, there are still selfish idiots who check their phone in the middle of a performance just inches from the stage). Eyes filling with warmth, joy, hope, love, happiness, terror, sadness. Eyes the gateway to Joey’s damaged, utterly lonely soul in all its heartrending humanity. And that’s not even the best part.

The best part is the riveting, theatrical conversation between Ryan’s stunning performance and Johan Bark’s equally stunning set, sounds and lights. Bark turning The Witness from a solo into a duet with a complex soundtrack featuring Tiësto, U2, a mangled Clair de Lune and some sentimental scoring. Sound and music pumping against sporadic newscasts and the insistent buzz of a mobile phone. Visuals enriched by cardboard flats, an elevated black base and some extraordinary flashing video projections. Lights creating a rave-like throbbing, or haunting like the shadowed corridors of hell. Music, lights and image crashing, tumbling, exploding, whispering, ensuring you can never turn your eyes away from Ryan's visceral immediacy, never break the palpable connection. Insisting you see what Joey bravely asks you to look at in all its monstrous evil.

What The Witness doesn’t tell it shows in raw, unvarnished detail. Revealing that if the devil is in the details, hell is the truth of Joey’s impossible childhood. Which was never a fact, a detail, or a statistic, but a lived experience. Like Goodfellas, The Witness might seem to speak to breaking the code of Omertà, but its real concern lies in exposing who and what that code tries to protect. There’s no honour in the abuse of children. The real crime is a vulnerable young child without real support from primary carers left prey to evil predators. The Witness tackling crime and abuse in working-class areas with no-holds-barred. Powerfully raw and beautifully visceral, The Witness invites you to where angels fear to thread. Not to be missed.

The Witness by Rex Ryan, based on Nicola Tallant’s book, The Witness: The Story of Joey The Lips O’Callaghan, runs at Glass Mask Theatre until November 1, and The Gaiety Theatre on February 14, 2027.

For more information visit Glass Mask Theatre