There’s a keen irony in Stephen Rea playing an East Belfast Protestant who is convinced that his infant granddaughter is Gerry Adams. During the 1988-94 British “broadcasting ban”, when legislation forbade broadcast media from transmitting the voices of members of Irish Republican organisations, Rea was the go-to guy for voicing-over the Sinn Féin leader, who once observed, “He does me better than I do.” Not unlike that historical episode, David Ireland’s play blends high absurdity and bloody earnest.

It is not set during the Northern Irish Troubles but in or around the present day; Rea’s character Eric is not a Loyalist thug but lives on one of the city’s most prosperous streets (renowned in wider culture from its namechecks on Van Morrison’s seminal Astral Weeks album). Yet Eric, in conversation with a psychiatrist, comes out with a portfolio of reactionary prejudices and stereotypes familiar to me from my own upbringing nearby. There is something comical about Ulster Prods’ antiquated-cartoon views of the world, until they start to be addressed seriously. In some ways, the most dangerous phase of all is when they cease to be accepted unquestioningly but are interrogated by folk terrified of their own uncertainty. This is the crisis which strikes Eric – “Without prejudice we’re nothing!”, he wails – and which ultimately drives him to extremes even more appalling than those he fears.

We see Rea onstage far too seldom, having generally to be content to wait for his all-but-mandatory appearance in the next Neil Jordan film. He is a consummate actor, especially on dramatic home territory, and to see him in the close-up environs of the Upstairs theatre is the kind of treat for which some would be prepared to sell a kidney.

The whole project is a fortuitous coming-together. The show arrives in London from co-producers the Abbey in Dublin, where Rea began his stage career. Director Vicky Featherstone knows Belfast-born, Glasgow-based actor-turned-playwright Ireland from her time running the National Theatre of Scotland. Above all, Cyprus Avenue is presented overhead from X, another Featherstone production in the Court’s main house, which also deals in offbeat but penetrating ways with issues of identity and isolation. The laughs stick in your throat, the serious questions lodge in your head.

Written for the Financial Times.