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...