The Honey Trap doesn’t ease you into history. It grabs you by the collar and says: remember this.
The play unfolds as a retrospective interview. A British soldier, years after the fact, looks back on 1979 Belfast, The Troubles still very much alive, raw, and lethal. He recalls one ordinary night that split his life cleanly in two.
A pub. Two married soldiers. Two young, attractive Irish women. Jokes. Drinks. That familiar, stupid, human moment where nothing feels consequential yet.
They decide to flirt. One soldier leaves with the women. The narrator doesn’t. His wife calls to tell him she’s pregnant, and guilt kicks in.
That phone call saves his life.
The women were IRA honeytraps. The friend is taken to a house and brutally executed. And that’s it. No heroics. No last stand. Just disappearance and death.
Years later, the surviving soldier is still living in that moment—burdened by guilt, PTSD, and a thirst for meaning that keeps shape-shifting into revenge. When he realizes the American historian interviewing him may hold the missing pieces, he crosses a line that feels both inevitable and horrifying. Tapes are stolen. Truths are uncovered. He learns who killed his friend.
The actual assassins are dead. One of the women fled to America and died under the weight of guilt and drug addiction. The other went to America too but later returned to Belfast where she runs a struggling cafe.
He finds her.
What follows is a masterclass in psychological tension. He charms her. Sleeps with her, something he always wanted to do, then holding a gun to her head and tells her who he is. The hotel room becomes a pressure chamber…truth, memory, justification, shame, grief, ideology, survival…all colliding with no clear exit.
There’s no neat resolution. No moral scoreboard. Just two people shaped (and misshapen) by a violent history they didn’t fully control but cannot escape.
Watching this, I kept thinking of my grandmother, who grew up in Northern Ireland. She used to tell us stories about the random violence. She told me how she and my grandpa went inside a candy store, only to learn that it was bombed the following day and no longer existed. She had no love for the IRA and their indiscriminate killings, though I know other Irish-American relatives felt differently. That tension…within families, across oceans, across generations…still hums beneath this play.
The Honey Trap understands that trauma doesn’t expire. That guilt nor shame obey timelines. That reason and revenge can coexist uncomfortably in the same body for decades.
It’s intimate. But it’s unsettling, right to the very end. And it leaves you sitting with the same question the characters can’t outrun:
What does accountability look like when everyone is already ruined?
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