'utterly compelling...unmissable'

'With his poet's ear, Barry has caught quite magnificently the patterns of Haughey's speech, that unique conjunction of puffed-up pomposity and vivid vulgarity.'

'In his extraordinary performance, Patrick Malahide almost entirely inhabits Haughey's voice. He captures quite astonishingly the way Haughey's speech mirrors the contradictions of his language, the ugly guttural tones riding on top of those rolling, stately, mesmeric cadences. And he achieves the same feat for Haughey's psychology, creating an utterly convincing amalgam of ruthlessness and sentimentality, inflated self-regard and emotional fragility, bluster and breakdown.'

'Here after all, is a national theatre doing what it should be doing: engaging with a figure who, for good and ill, is deeply embedded in the national psyche. Here is an extraordinarily gifted writer working his way inside a language that has dominated public discourse in the Republic for three decades. Here is, above all, a performance from Patrick Malahide that embodies with breathtaking skill the state of the public realm.'