Making its debut in Melbourne at fortyfivedownstairs after successful seasons in Sydney’s Belvoir (Downstairs Theatre and mainstage) in 2024, Grace Chapple’s Never Closer is a tinderbox of a play.

It begins innocently enough on Christmas Eve, with a quintet of school friends in voluble party mode and copious amounts of booze that help stimulate reminiscences, but there are early clues that the night will descend into chaos. It is, after all, set in Northern Ireland, and we’re right in the heart of the Troubles, a period of sectarian violence.

Patalog Theatre’s Never Closer at fortyfivedownstairs. Photo © Cameron Grant

The play opens in 1970s, with the young adults Deidre (Enya Daly), Connor (Damon Baudin), Naimh (Ella Ferris), Mary (Molly Holohan) and Jimmy (Ben Walter) at various turning points in their lives, with Niamh in particular about to leave for London to study psychiatry. The night’s celebrations are ostensibly to mark her farewell, despite her friends’ qualms about her decision to defect into enemy territory.

A decade later, there is another reunion. Niamh is now engaged to an Englishman, Harry (Karl Richmond), which, given the deep animosity borne of historical grievances between the UK and Ireland, causes some friction among her staunchly Republican friends.

Directly by Marni Mount, this brisk 90 minute production is engaging from the start, helped by the brilliantly conceived design (by Dann Barber and Ella Butler) that sees the set reconfigured as an enclosed square with windows so the audience, seated on three sides, is able to witness the happenings in the chintzy living room. You feel as though you are eavesdropping on their conversations.

Patalog Theatre’s Never Closer at fortyfivedownstairs. Photo © Cameron Grant

Set as it is in a very specific time of political turbulence, theatregoers may be better served by this production if they have some background insight into the Troubles (there is assumed knowledge of the longstanding rift between Catholics and Protestants, Republicans and Nationalists).

Nevertheless, Never Closer still packs a powerful punch, regardless of how sketchy your awareness is of the 30-year long civil war in Northern Ireland. It’s still a universal story of the difficulty of moving on from the past, and how violence and generational trauma can shape you.

The young feisty actors are all believable as good friends, but mates with secrets and grievances that come to the fore on the two nights that we see them drink, embrace, dance, argue, and fight. Harry’s bumbling and obvious outsider status provides some levity to the proceedings, but with background noise of bombings at nearby checkpoints, and more lighthearted stories of ghosts and a seance play-acting among the group, death is portentous and never far from the nights’ merriment.

Never Closer plays at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne until 24 May.