The Honey Trap – 10 October 2025

Incredibly bold and cleverly told, The Honey Trap by Leo McGann simultaneously took place in 1979 and the present day. The story examined British soldiers stationed in Belfast and the IRA espionage women of the night. Over the course of the story, the audience got to see things depicted multiple ways—the way that the present day characters were telling each other these stories and the way that they actually played out in 1979. From these distinctions, one could examine an objective truth beside a lie in order to use the motives for lying to determine how people really felt about their involvement in these violent events. In particular, it helped the audience determine who felt guilty.

The story starts with an interview that an American historian (Molly Ranson) is conducting with former British soldier Dave (Michael Hayden) about the murder of his fellow soldier and close friend Bobby (Harrison Tipping). Rather than hear Dave recount the story of the night Bobby was lured from a bar to his death by two Irish women, Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski), the audience sees the story as Dave recounts it surround the interview table and take over the space. Dave watches his younger self (Daniel Marconi) interact with everybody at the bar, with particular attention paid to what he says to Bobby. In a later rendition of the same scene, the audience discovers that what was actually said was derogatory and hurtful rather than affectionate and kind. Does Dave misremember? Does he feel guilty? Is his desperate need to avenge Bobby’s death about his love for Bobby or appeasing his own conscience?

The second half shows a different side to the story, as revenge-bent Dave hunts down present-day Lisa, whose real name is Sonia (Samantha Mathis). The story unfolds similarly to their initial meeting in 1979. Under duress, she tells a story that paints her as more innocent than the show’s final moments reveal her to be. The audience is left with similar questions. Does she misremember or want to? Does she feel guilty? Or is Sonia still very invested in the cause of a United Ireland and just lying out of self-preservation? The Honey Trap asks us these questions in ways that deliberately confuse us as to who is the honey, who is the trap, and more broadly how much control a person really has over the course of their lives. In the end, we all have to paint ourselves into someone we can live with, and Matt Torney’s beautiful direction choices boldly demand an accountability that is later posited to be impossible.

The experience of watching the show feels like solving a riddle or watching a war movie. It’s fascinating to watch the psychology play out in real time, and the design choices really support a level of reflection, later turned introspection that is brilliantly executed. The Honey Trap’s biggest success is the way it doesn’t brow beat the higher level intellectual concepts onto the viewer, but rather presents a very frequent situation (a person tells a lie for social/situational desirability) in a very extreme context (Belfast, 1979) to ask some questions about the little white lies that sweeten our recounting of how something happened. In addition to the honey trap as an espionage tactic, in the literal sense, honey can be used to sweeten/thicken a liquid to ease how something goes down one’s throat. The honey makes it more palatable and disguises any bitterness in the taste. The primary question I left The Honey Trap thinking about was that the small lies I tell, the small lies anyone tells, are no bigger or better than the ones these characters told—the difference is the importance of truth in their context. Yet what they’re doing is really no worse than what anyone else would do. Does this make them both victims, caught in a honey trap? Is it not about discovering who trapped whom? Are the lies the trap? These are unanswerable questions that The Honey Trap left swirling around obsessively in my brain, attracted there like flies to honey.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Print Shop PR.