Stories informed by the sectarian violence experienced in Northern Ireland in the period of The Troubles are – in Sydney at least – hot right now.

Grace Chapple’s Never Closer is the third I’ve seen this month, the first being Misery Loves Company at KXT Broadway and the second the revival of Ulster American at the Ensemble.

Adam Sollis, Ariadne Sgouros, Raj Labade and Emma Diaz in Never Closer. Photo © Brett Boardman

Never Closer debuted in Belvoir’s Downstairs Theatre in 2022 and is one of just a handful to have made the move to Belvoir’s mainstage. Rightly, it has retained its original cast.

The play opens in buoyant mood in 1977 with a group of close teenaged friends – Deidre, Conor, Naimh, Mary and Jimmy – sharing whiskey, cigarettes and ghost stories. Spirits are high and the banter charged with interpersonal tensions, mostly of the romantic sort. These are Catholic kids in a town on the Irish border, a place where political and religious affiliations are everything – a fact later underlined by the distant boom of an explosion at an army checkpoint.

A jump cut, the same room, though...