SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2025

BIAF 25 - Unreconciled
Jay Sefton in 'Unreconciled'. Photo: Andrew Greto

Jay Sefton and Mark Basquill's Unreconciled, directed by Geraldine Hughes and staged at the Naughton Studio at Belfast's Lyric as part of this year's Belfast International Arts Festival, is "lightning in a bottle" on stage – a gently portrayed, honestly depicted and thunderously impactful one-man show. A true-to-life point-of-view tale of school, family, work, religion and more, conveyed with great skill and at times astonishing levels of physical expression, Unreconciled is a production that gradually commands attention with unparalleled sharpness and never lets up during the whole of its eighty-minute running time. Light entertainment, it is not, but unforgettably confrontational, it is.

Pivotal to the strengths and purpose of Unreconciled is the recollective performance from Sefton, the recalling of memories of an adolescent actor being cast in a school play by a parish priest. As Sefton presents these memories and faces them, the truthful and the traumatic are tremendously blended in a taut, gripping, heart-rending presentation which finds a way to express realities in ways that can actually be humorous as well as unsparing. The small moments in that past life are starkly and expertly contrasted with revelations of the immoral, even repulsive, kind, and it's impossible not to be compelled and shocked by what unfolds. Unreconciled is that engrossing.

Sefton's acting background lends further resonance to Unreconciled. For acting is about playing pretend, and it can be terribly hard to put on a show of calmness for all in tandem with personal issues that the outside world may neither see nor, perhaps, wish to see. And what about maintaining composure in the face of a situation where external figures entrusted with responsibility and keeping the populace safe may very well know what's really been happening, or is happening, but are giving the impression of pretending it isn't happening or hasn't happened? The little details count, too, such as a brief but very clever reference to Steven Spielberg's exceptional Jaws. One hears Sefton cite the moment where Robert Shaw's Quint speaks of the titular shark's eyes as "lifeless" and "like a doll's" and immediately thinks of a singular, uncaring, chilling focus, the kind which is purely directed on the protection of purpose or foundation for the self ahead of the painful reality that may be more noticeable if there was less shutting away from the world and more awareness of both context and consequence. And, as with Roy Scheider's Brody, you get the sense that Sefton has really been pushed to the edge to stay afloat. Unreconciled is his survival story, a clear attempt to humanely reconcile inner and outer demons, a form of therapy from not only an actor but the licenced mental health counsellor that Sefton is - and every single moment of the narrative is really felt by the Naughton Studio audience.

At the time of writing, Unreconciled is nearing the end of its short run in the Lyric, but it is, or should be, hoped that it returns for another run in these parts, at least due to the meaningful and emotional nature of not only the play itself but the discussions that followed the performance I attended. For this is unprecedented, open rawness at its finest, a hard-hitting combination of understated eloquence and forthright revelations that bring out the direct and observational honesty in theatre. It's masterful.

Simon Fallaha

Unreconciled concludes its Belfast International Arts Festival #BIAF25 run at the Naughton Studio in Belfast's Lyric Theatre on Sunday October 19. For more information on the play itself, click here.