Winner of three Irish Times Theatre Awards including Best Production and Best Director, Improbable Frequency is elaborate and surreal satire that lifts the lid on Ireland’s beloved neutrality and cuts to the heart of the tempestuous affair with its nearest neighbour – England! It comes to the Cork Opera House as party of a national tour from Tuesday, November 13 until Saturday, November 17.

“The central character in Improbable Frequency is Tristram Faraday, a crossword geek recruited by MI5 as a code-breaker, and sent to Dublin in 1941 to investigate some suspicious messages on an Irish radio requests programme,” says writer and Fermoy native Arthur Riordan. “This probably wouldn’t have been regarded as a plum job in espionage circles. While there he encounters the English poet, John Betjeman, the legendary Myles na gCopaleen, and the oversexed Austrian physicist, Erwin Schroedinger (he of Schroedinger’s Cat fame). He also falls in with the beautiful and mysterious British spy, Agent Green, and the lovely Philomena, an Irish civil servant, whose suspicious behaviour leads him into a labyrinthine plot involving the IRA, Nazis, sub-atomic physics, and a possible end to Irish neutrality.”

Going on what Riordan says about the shows premises, the productions plot seems quite convoluted with many different characters studies and plot developments running simultaneously, but, as fantastical as it all sounds, Improbable Frequency has its basis in fact.

“He was the British Cultural Attache here in 1941, and widely reputed to have been a spy. In fact, an IRA man eventually wrote to him, saying he’d planned to assassinate Betjeman, but changed his mind after reading his poems! Schroedinger was also in Dublin at the time, brought over by deValera to set up the Institute Of Advanced Studies (which was regularly lampooned by Myles, in his pieces about the Research Bureau) Many of the characters and events are fictional though, and of course there’s no such city as Dublin.”

Neutrality as a moral option is an issue that is quite prevalent in the context of Improbable Frequency, but it’s also an issue that is very much relevant today, considering Ireland’s supposed neutral stance on the war in Iraq, a standing that is juxtaposed by the Government’s decision to allow American planes to re-fuel here. While Arthur feels our adoption of a neutral stance was necessary during the time in which Improbable Frequency is based, the stance in today’s circumstances doesn’t ring true with the writer.