SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2026
Paddy: The Life & Times Of
Paddy Armstrong
Don Wycherley as Paddy Armstrong in 'Paddy: The Life & Times Of Paddy Armstrong'.
Production Photo: Ciaran Dolan
Days after taking in Matthew Zajac's astonishing true-to-life one man show The Tailor Of Inverness at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre, I am plunged right into what turns out to be another astonishing true-to-life one man show in the form of Paddy: The Life & Times Of Paddy Armstrong at Belfast's Lyric Theatre. Directed by Mary-Elaine Tynan, co-written by Tynan, Niamh Gleeson and Don Wycherley, and starring Wycherley, this is another example of complex and compelling theatrical fragmentation, a gripping character study with a superb central performance entirely worthy of the emotional literacy demanded by the script and the situation.
Adapted from a memoir co-penned by Tynan and Paddy Armstrong himself, which bears the title Life After Life, Paddy: The Life & Times Of Paddy Armstrong feels like just that – one life after another or several lives blending into one, wrapped up in Wycherley's marvellous capacity for expression. In playing Armstrong, one of the Guildford Four who were wrongly convicted of bombings in the 1970s, Wycherley looks like he is almost permanently on edge. Michael Finneran's clever lighting offers him the pressure of a spotlight, a beam of hope and downcast gloom, and Tina Kavanagh's most impressive costuming gives him a purple gown along with black and white trainers with a luminous green on their tips, all while Wycherley sports a hairstyle reminiscent of Jack Nicholson – it's an echo of The Joker himself. And if you choose to look at it that way, you can see this as a man trying to come to terms with his own life's events by adapting a stand up comic's position as a coping mechanism, a tragic joker but without the amplified vaudeville routine and barely any melodrama.
Don Wycherley as Paddy Armstrong in 'Paddy: The Life & Times Of Paddy Armstrong'.
Production Photo: Ciaran Dolan
Then, it occurs to us. Wycherley's Father Ted alter ego Father Cyril MacDuff was, like his poor counterpart Father Dougal McGuire, a sad clown, too often there to be condescended to or laughed at rather than viewed as the real person he deserved to be seen as. Therefore this play is about understanding and learning to look beyond the source of perceived meaninglessness or mockery that is in danger of being tossed away and neglected by the suits in a structure – the more-fragile-than-they-think "house of cards" who, perhaps, would rather not think about the wild "jokers in the pack" who might actually be sustaining them.
Paddy: The Life And Times Of Paddy Armstrong is also a story of conditioning and adjustment, particularly within an enclosed space as either metaphor or reality. I am reminded of the introduction of Tony in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story – a film I have often referenced for its masterful illustration of masculinity – where we find that, be he "free" or be he "locked in", he has moved from one form of confinement to another. "Entrapped" or "protected", antisocial or social, we see, on the Lyric stage here, the art of conditioning, portrayed with absolute honesty. As a zone of concentration or identity, where a strange sense of reassurance is gathered simply from discovering and then knowing what to do, who to see and so on – a search and survival strategy. And Paddy's searching, and his survival, is a multi-dimensional tale – one where we see that taking time to confront both his soul and memories made is a genuine source of growth. Where one of the biggest battles is that which one fights with the self, and where one stands to be the most courageous and the most potentially triumphant for facing it.
Simon Fallaha
A Wooden Bridge Production, Paddy: The Life & Times Of Paddy Armstrong concludes its run at Belfast's Lyric Theatre on Sunday September 13. For more information on, and tickets for, the Lyric Theatre run, click here. For more on the play itself, click here.