The Honey Trap
Written by Leo McGann; Directed by Matt Torney
Irish Rep, Francis J. Greenburger Mainstage, | 132 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
September 17 - February 15, 2026
It is a line spoken casually, even flirtatiously with danger, but it reverberates through Leo McGann’s The Honey Trap, now receiving a taut yet unsettlingly porous production at the Irish Repertory Theatre. “You could be dead tomorrow,” young Dave (Daniel Marconi) tells his army buddy Bobby (Harrison Tipping) during a night of heedless revelry in 1979 Belfast, offering carpe diem as both injunction and alibi. In McGann’s meticulous dramaturgy, that youthful credo metastasizes into something far bleaker: an eternal present tense in which the traumatic instant, rather than receding into narrative distance, expands to eclipse future and past alike. Time, in this play, is not the healer we have been promised; it is merely the slow, uncredited accomplice to damage.
McGann structures The Honey Trap as a diptych—two acts, two temporal planes, two haunted consciousnesses—interlocked with the precision of a trigger mechanism. In the present, Dave (Michael Hayden), now a former British soldier with the weary, granular heaviness of a man who has lived too long with a secret, submits to an interview by Emily (Molly Ranson), an American PhD student compiling oral histories of the Troubles. As he reconstructs the fateful night in 1979 Lisburn, the past materializes around him: Bobby, bright-eyed and doomed; the pub with its brittle conviviality; the two women, Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski) and Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon), whose flirtation is a carefully laid snare. Dave left early—summoned home by guilt after his usual call to his pregnant wife—but Bobby remained, and what unfolded next was less an accident than the consummation of a fatal design.
The production’s intercutting between eras—older Dave observing the impulsive soldier he once was, Bobby drifting in and out like a conscience in search of a host—creates the kind of theatrical palimpsest in which temporal layers remain visible beneath one another. Director Matt Torney maintains a propulsive clarity, and even though there are occasional moments where there are “competing” stage pictures, as in life, when there are simultaneous narratives thrust before us, Torney suggests our visual paths confidently. The conclusion of Act I, in particular, challenges: after Dave steals Emily’s tapes and uncovers the name he has spent decades dreading and desiring, the stage swells with spectral figures. The moment cries out for austerity—Dave alone with the revelation that will undo him—but is instead diluted by the dramaturgical equivalent of background noise, or shall we say interference. Matt Torney directs with a finely calibrated tension, orchestrating the interplay between Dave’s half-buried memories of 1979 Belfast and his faltering present-day reckonings with an almost musical precision. He refuses to let the audience settle into any stable vantage point; instead, he keeps the past bleeding steadily into the present, ensuring that comfort—emotional, moral, or theatrical—is never more than a fleeting illusion. If you look for a character at his crossroads, you will see him. It is an unusual directorial choice, but an exciting and valid one in an otherwise disciplined production that understands the eloquence of stillness.
The first act acquires much of its credibility from Hayden and Ranson, who establish between them a wary détente: two people circling each other with questions that are also defenses. Hayden’s Dave is coiled, meticulous, and just a touch performative in his contrition—suggesting a man who wants to be seen as repentant almost as much as he wishes to believe it himself. Ranson’s Emily, bright but guarded, telegraphs that she, too, is withholding. Their mutual mistrust becomes the engine of the play’s excavation.
But it is Act II—when Dave pursues Sonia (Samantha Mathis) to her cafe, her place of business, engaging in a very active flirtation that culminates in their after-date confrontation in a Belfast hotel room—that reveals the full moral architecture of McGann’s design. Mathis does not appear until late, yet her Sonia arrives bearing the accumulated weight of decades: a woman who has succeeded, in outward terms, at building a life, yet whose past remains viscous, adhesive, impossible to shed. The confrontations between Dave and Sonia unfold like a series of involuntary confessions, punctuated by flashbacks that interleave their personal histories with the collective violence of the era. When Dave records Sonia’s admission—seeking, perhaps, the absolution that might come from documentation—he discovers that she has long carried her own dossier of guilt and knowledge about him. The symmetry is startling, and intentional.
What follows—an impasse in which each has the power to kill the other, and each refrains—might seem, in lesser hands, like a nod toward reconciliation. McGann rejects that solace. The decision not to kill is stripped of redemptive glow; it is simply the recognition that both are already hollowed out by the same catastrophic night. Annihilation has already occurred. To pull the trigger would be redundant.
McGann is scrupulous in denying the audience the comfort of moral binaries. Sonia’s actions were reprehensible, yes—but rooted in a family history of violence and displacement that helps explain, without pardoning, her radicalization. Dave’s grief for Bobby is genuine—but he also harassed, needled, and finally coerced his friend into remaining at the pub, compelling him to behave in ways Dave himself could not countenance while awaiting the birth of his child. Bobby becomes, in effect, the vessel for Dave’s disavowed desires, and thus the sacrificial object of his self-loathing. Both Dave and Sonia are equally implicated, equally wounded; both have lived for thirty-five years in the long shadow of a moment they cannot revise. The Honey Trap suggests that guilt, contrary to moral folklore, does not ennoble. It calcifies. It teaches us to mimic contrition while leaving the underlying self untouched.
The production’s visual language underscores this bleakness. Charlie Corcoran’s adaptable set slips fluidly between interview room, pub, and hotel chamber, suggesting that these spaces, in the characters' memories, have collapsed into a single continuous interior terrain. Sarita Fellows’s costumes perform a quiet but crucial labor, knitting the eras together with a kind of understated dramaturgy—each garment a thread binding past to present, memory to its afterlife. Michael Gottlieb’s amber-drenched lighting coats the flashbacks with a slightly gnawing nostalgia—memory as something both seductive and toxic. And James Garver’s sound design moves with an almost liquid assurance through the play’s tonal spectrum, slyly lubricating moments of banter and unease alike, until even the smallest auditory cue seems to vibrate with the tension coiled beneath the story’s surface.
The final image—Bobby, boyish, requesting something so mundane as a toastie—is devastating precisely because of its triviality. We understand, as he cannot, that this ordinary desire marks the threshold of catastrophe. The Honey Trap ends not with resolution but with an endurance test: what remains after all possible outcomes have been foreclosed? McGann offers no means of escape from the eternal recurrence of that violent night. His characters are caught, forever, in their own amber-lit memory spiral. The audience leaves the theater carrying something like the burden the characters shoulder: the uneasy sense that understanding the past does not loosen its grip, and that some stories resist the consolation of closure.
McGann is clearly on to something. With this play, he has captured the hearts and the imaginations of Irish Rep’s stalwart audience so much so, that after one extension on the original engagement, they are bringing it back for another six weeks in the new year. A brilliant piece of theater deserves to be seen.
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Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 13, 2025 All rights reserved.