The play to watch if your country is breaking up

Of all the West End’s unloved venues the loveliest is the Arts Theatre. It specialises in creaky off-beat plays like Only Our Own by Ann Henning Jocelyn. We’re in Connemara, in the west of Ireland, in the early 1990s. A family of Anglo–Irish toffs are struggling to cope with their status as universal pariahs. Wherever they go they’re out of place. Catholic Ireland resents them. In England, their spiritual home, they feel like aliens. Titania, a narky teenager, is baffled by her parents’ religious prejudices and she merrily announces her involvement with a boozy local bumpkin. He’s Catholic, naturally. This prompts a bombshell of a speech from Titania’s grandmother, Lady Eliza, who witnessed a village insurrection in 1922 when she was just 11. A gang of rebels axed their way through the main doors of the mansion at midnight. They decapitated her Pekingese with a shovel, shot her brother in the face, irrigated the floors with petrol (‘our petrol from our garage’), and turned the gilded fuse into a fireball.