Play Review: Famine Fortune

by Hanna Nielson

Directed by Luke Mosely and written by Jamie Phillips, Famine Fortune is billed as, “A comedy following two Irishmen during the Famine as they discover the last potato in Ireland.”

When I was first invited to review a play called ‘Famine Fortune,’ I found myself asking:

Is this really the moment for a play making light of Ireland’s Great Famine? No, maybe not. But is this the right time for a comedy about famine in general, given the state of the world? Also, no, perhaps not. But these lads have the spuds to do it, so I was curious to see how they would pull it off. They use every Irish stereotype in the book and dare you to laugh – and wouldn’t ya know, bejesus, you do. The characters are ludicrous and lightly drawn, and they dare you to care about them – and you do that, too. It’s an unlikely crowd pleaser about two starving Irishmen who resort to selling out their neighbours, eating dogs, and hiding potatoes in places nature never intended – all to live another day and make it to America (that place currently struggling to remain known as the land of the free).

The performance ran from 12-13 June, 2025, in The Black Box, an intimate events space with a handy bar, located in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter. It was a supportive and friendly audience, everyone chatting and seeming to know one another, perhaps entire neighbourhoods’ worth, though I knew not a whisker of a person there.

This one-hour play was scripted and produced by Jamie Phillips, directed by Luke Mosley, and performed by Jay Green, Tyler Barr, and George Glasby, with a supporting role by Jamie Phillips. It was put on by Steel Harbour productions, co-founded by the director and Liam Dugan, stage manager. They have toured Sheffield, Manchester, and Preston, and many of the company previously performed together in another production at Edinburgh Fringe. The cast and crew are either graduates or currently attending University of Central Lancashire, and all but one are originally from Northern Ireland. (I’ve included their bios at the end of this piece to make it handier to get to know them.)

The two leads are somewhat reminiscent of young, Irish versions of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck – think Good Will Hunting era. With fresh-faced Jay Green, earnestly playing the desperate but not too bright Mickey – who abducts the true star of this play, the potato. The last potato in Ireland, in fact. It’s a small but mighty part, the potato. A fistful of talent that gets into and out of some tight places with both ease and grace. Mickey’s roommate Jimmy, the brother of his late wife, is played by Tyler Barr with dark-eyed intensity and cinematic cheekbones that would have suited The Wind That Shakes the Barley, except he was probably in kindergarten then. The antagonist is played by George Glasby, revelling in the gleefully sociopathic role of ‘The Englishman’ and chewing as much scenery as the budget will allow. The comic relief of this comedy (though I can’t believe I’m typing that) is country bumpkin Joe, the quietly defiant Gaelic-speaker at a time when the language was outlawed. He is played touchingly and uproariously by the playwright himself, Jamie Phillips.

The play opens with Mickey and Jimmy bickering over who gets the last scraps of dinner, and bantering about ‘don’t you know there’s a famine on’ in a kind of on-the-nose opener – all the while planning how to get jobs and scrape together enough money to survive. Their last hope is being picked to work for the same English who are stripping the land of food, shipping it over to England under armed guard, meanwhile the local populace starves because the potatoes they depend upon for their staple crop have suffered a blight.

Though their suffering is played for gags, there is historical accuracy and heartfelt feeling throughout the play that keeps the pendulum from swinging too far into either exploitation or sentimentality. It’s a bit of Dickensian tight-rope walking.

Jimmy is the practical one: they need to eat, and the moral high ground can wait. Mickey begrudgingly goes along with the plan to abandon their morals and work for the English oppressors, but, left alone before bed, he lights a candle and speaks to the spirit of his late wife Mary, who died – literally worked to death – in one of the workhouses established by the English for those who lost their farms and livelihoods in the famine.

His grief is touching; he hasn’t forgotten her face or the sound of her voice. Though the cliché of a haunting spirit is avoided and Mary never appears on stage, she’s very much a presence in Mickey’s life. He says: ‘When my mind plays tricks on me, I feel like I’ve lost you all over again.’

Next day, Jimmy is furious with Mickey for blowing their chances at working for the English. Because of his love for Mary, and continued anger at the injustice of her death, Mickey had scorned and insulted the English overlords – preferring to starve than endure the insult of kowtowing to them. Jimmy sensibly points out they’re already starving. If they don’t eat soon, they won’t be fit enough to work – and things will only get worse.

They dream about escaping to America. ‘It’s the land of the free because they kicked the English out,’ Jimmy says. (To clarify for contemporary audiences, America at the time the play is set was not ruled by a fanatical tyrant.)

I won’t detail what happened to the family dog, Scruffy. Something similar befell farmer Joe’s pet rabbit. Ah, the sad, desperate times.

That night, when Mickey again lights a candle and talks to the spirit of Mary, he tells her Englishman who rules the estate was overheard boasting about having the last potato in Ireland. Not that he planned to eat it, no. It was set in a display case, to show off to all his English friends. Mickey begins to reason: surely a man who keeps a potato in a display case doesn’t need it to survive and ‘wouldn’t miss it if it was gone.’ An sudden idea strikes him…

(The following contains all kinds of spoilers.) The next day, Jimmy announces he’s gotten a job but it’s barely enough to feed one, let alone get them both to America. Mickey reveals he’s sorted things about money – and reveals the coveted potato. He’s a bit shy about revealing where he got it, but it certain that if they can auction it, they’ll get more than enough for passage to America. The trouble with his thinking is, well – he’s bad at thinking. Jimmy points out there aren’t any Irish with enough money to buy the potato. But they could sell it to the wealthy English – perhaps to the owner of the estate. Mickey is forced to confess he stole the potato from the self-same Englishman.

Cue the despair – Jimmy knows they’ll be killed, maimed, or shipped to Australia as convicts if anyone finds out they’ve got the stolen potato. The best thing to do is eat the evidence. Mickey protests there must be another way, one that leads to fortune and safety, but he has just twenty-four hours to figure it out – otherwise Jimmy will take matters into his own hands.

Mickey struggles to think – and though this is played for comedic effect, I imagine the brain fog of those desperate times was more intense than scrolling five different social media apps, placing Deliveroo orders, and trying to keep track of which cities are currently on fire. Just as he’s about to eat the evidence, the Englishman barges in to search the place and offers a reward of £10 (an enormous sum of money back in the day) to anyone who delivers the potato and hands over the thief. A slapstick bit of comedy ensues and the potato is hidden from prying eyes in an unlikely place, much to Mickey’s discomfort.

The Englishman roars and gurns like a Panto villain, searches Mickey, finds him seemingly potato-less, and spews any number of Irish slurs – which the Belfast audience received rather stonily – but the chuckles resumed once Mickey was alone, struggling to retrieve the potato from his arse (it’s not really a spoiler as it’s all over their social media). Potato extracted, he then rushes off, determined on a new plan of action.

And so, we meet Joe – gentle country bumpkin, lover of rabbits, speaker of Gaelic, who lost his wife and his left hand to the English. He can only count to five but he has a dream, you see, of going to Australia and seeing the kangaroos, which are to his mind just big rabbits.

Mickey and Jimmy have decided that simple Joe is simple enough to convince to take the fall for stealing the potato. They’ll get the reward money, and Joe will get his dream – er, sort of. He’ll get free passage to Australia anyway. Sure, he may have to endure forced labour for a while, but eventually he’ll be free to start a new life. Joe is agreeable to just about anything, and in fact can’t believe his luck.

I have to say there was something quite endearing and ‘lived in’ about Jimmy Phillips’s performance as Joe here; while the others are a bit desperate to save their hides, and the ‘business’ of the play is at its height, the portrayal of Joe is refreshingly Zen-like, unhurried, and even dignified at times. It would be easy to play this part one-dimensionally, but Phillips adds a touch of unselfconscious nobility, easy ribaldry, and flashes of rebel fire – especially when he squares off with the Englishman.

When Mickey is out putting the plan in motion, Jimmy stays behind with Joe and they share a drink and a few stories. While Jimmy is afraid of speaking Gaelic because it’s been outlawed by the English, Joe insists on speaking it because his mother taught him, and he took her philosophy to heart: ‘We’ll speak their tongue but we’ll think in our own’ and ‘A country with no language is a country with no soul.’ His wife was deported for teaching Gaelic, but the boat capsized before ever reaching a penal colony. A neighbour informed on her. Joe laments how things were before the Famine. ‘The people really looked after each other – that was, when their bellies were full.’

It’s an interesting line that presages what’s to come. It also strikes Jimmy through the heart. Though Mickey and Jimmy seem to gloss over, even in their own minds, the worst that can happen to Joe for taking the fall for their theft, there’s are sense of complexity in this scene between Jimmy and Joe. Jimmy wrangles with his conscience the most, but there’s a hardness that Barr brings to those moments that create a complicated depth – a ‘him or me’ survival choice, and a grim sense perhaps he’s doing Joe a favour, because dying in a shipwreck or in Australia surely can’t be any worse than starving to death in Ireland (a reality that many an Irish ancestor had to face, including my own – though obviously their boat made it or I wouldn’t be writing this).

(Big spoilers ahead!) When the Englishman arrives, brought there by Mickey, simple Joe gleefully declares himself the potato thief. Mickey and Jimmy act the part of innocents just helping out the boss by turning tout. The Englishman rages at Joe, not least because Joe has stolen from him before – a loaf of bread, and hence the reason for his missing left hand. When he demands to know how Joe can conscience so much thievery, Joe says, ‘Ah well, I said a few Hail Marys, so I’m all right with the Big Man.’ The Englishman growls, ‘We’ll have none of that popery here!’ And Joe, hard of hearing, immediately takes a basket of potpourri and tosses it outside, saying, ‘To be honest, I never liked the smell of it myself.’ (This earned the biggest laugh of the night. A well-known theatre critic sitting beside me laughed out loud, and he had been stoic most of the night.)

When the Englishman leads Joe outside, promising he’ll be on the next boat off the island, Mickey and Jimmy rejoice that the plan has worked. Then a deafening gunshot rings out. The Englishman stalks back in, pistol in hand, gloating about giving the thief what he deserved. Tossing the reward money on the table, he blithely assures them that someone will come bury the dead man tomorrow.

It's a grim, hurried ending as the two men grab their meagre belongings in a dash to leave Ireland forever. Ten pounds – it’s the price of their freedom as well as the cost of another man’s life. Bound for America, they’re not heroes now but thieves in the night – already burying this story of survival and determined to leave the old ghosts behind for a new chance at freedom.

Gathering up his last few treasures, Mickey pauses, spotting the candle he uses to speak to the spirit of Mary. He doesn’t take it with him but leaves his rosary wrapped round it. The play ends with Sinead O’Connor’s spoken word song ‘Famine’ sailing out from a darkened stage.

The lyrics are hard-hitting and make a point that the play glides over in favour of gags – namely the cost paid forward to future generations after the Famine due to the choices forced on survivors by the greed of a privileged few – the evidence still etched into bodies, furrowed into minds, taking root, sprouting despite all the attempts to bury it. It's a nod in the direction of acknowledgment, but not really the aim of the storytelling here.

Warm applause greeted the actors, and cheerful boos for Glasby, still in his Englishman attire, which he took in stride. It was hard to tell if there was a standing ovation or if folks were just keen to rush to the bar, not twenty feet away. No matter, the audience seemed satisfied and entertained, eager to linger on and congratulate the cast and crew.

I found it entertaining on the whole – and I’m mindful of the fact that many of the cast and crew are currently studying or recently graduated from acting and media courses. This is a play that attempts a difficult feat: to weave comedy with accurate history and heart-felt moments, walking a fine line between belly laughs and grim facts about a subject that is still hard to deal with in a way that avoids falling into either abject misery or crass dismissiveness.

Well done, lads - It takes a lot to put on a production from scratch, take it on tour, and to stage a comedy about the Famine in Ireland – in Ireland. And as the lyrics to Sinead O’Connor’s song 'Famine' remind us, this was a genocide and not a famine; and for there to ever be healing there must first be remembering.

This is an episode of history our ancestors were told, by various means, to forget. Irreverently and audaciously, this play is an attempt at remembering.

Below are the cast and crew biographies (adapted from their Instagram account @faminefortune):

BIO FOR CAST & CREW

CAST:

JAY GREEN – ‘Mickey’

From Northern Ireland, Jay is in his third year studying at University of Central Lancashire. He holds a Performing Arts diploma from Armagh Southern Regional College. Favourite potato: roasties but extra crispy.

TYLER BARR – ‘Jimmy’

From Northern Ireland, Tyler is in his second year of acting at University of Central Lancashire. He studied Performing and Production Arts as Armagh Southern Regional College, and has performed in various productions including a summer youth project for The Grand Opera House in ‘Pirates of Penzance’. Favourite potato: chips, utterly drenched in taco sauce.

GEORGE GLASBY – ‘The Englishman’

Based in South Yorkshire, George is represented by BTM Commercials. He graduacted from University of Central Lancashire in 2022 with a First Class Honours degree in Acting. Favourite potato: all potatoes.

JAMIE PHILLIPS – ‘Joe’ (also Playwright and Producer)

Graduated from University of Central Lancashire in 2022, with a First Class Honours degree in Acting, Jamie has worked with companies such as Belvoir Players, an award-winning NI theatre company established 1968, and Steel Harbour in 2022 in their Edinburgh Fringe Production of ‘Broke Her.’ This play is his debut as a writer. Favourite potato: roasties.

CREW:

LUKE MOSLEY – Director

A graduate of University of Central Lancashire, 2021, Luke has previously worked on Arts Council funded projects, developments and plays, as well as acting. Co-founder of Steel Harbour, he also produced his own work ‘Broke Her’ at Edinburgh Fringe 2022. Favourite potato: Vin Diesel.

LIAM DUGAN – Stage Manager

Co-owner of Steel Harbour and co-producer of ‘Broke Her’ for Edinburgh Fringe, 2022, Liam is also an actor-producer. He graduated from University of Central Lancashire with a degree in Acting, 2021. Favourite potato: baked.

ANDREW ANDERSON – Videographer, Marketing Mmanager

Brand and marketing manager, social media manager, videographyer, and all around digital maestro, Andrew graduated from LJMU with First Class degree in Media Production, and was awarded the Lynda La Plante Fund Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Media Production.

Favourite potato: caked in freshly ploughed soil.

EXTRA INFO

Extensively documented on social media, the lads have a planned documentary in the works.

PREVIOUS PERFORMANCES:

Sheffield, The Lantern Theatre, 7-8th June, 2025

Preston, The Media Factory, 10-11 May, 2025

Manchester, The Kings Arms, Salford, 10 June, 2025