Michael Hayden and Molly Ranson Photo by Carol Rosegg

The program describes the place and time as "Belfast, 1979 and present day," but let's dial that present day back to about 2015, when "Game of Thrones," a minor plot point, was thriving, and Dave (an outstanding Michael Hayden) would have been in his late 50s, as the script specifies. A British soldier thrown into Northern Ireland during the late-1970s Troubles, he's agreed to be a subject of the Belfast Project, McGann's version, moved up a decade or so, of Boston College's 2000-2006 oral history of paramilitaries who labored there from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Emily (Molly Ranson), his Irish-American student-interviewer, strives to be impartial in her conversations with IRA vets, Loyalists, and Dave, her first Brit. But he's suspicious of her objectivity, which leads to a lively back-and-forth where he hectors her, makes inappropriate remarks, and loses his temper more than once. Dave's tortured memories of his service center around one fateful night at a pub, one that resulted in the death of his compatriot and best bud, Bobby (Harrison Tipping). The Dave-Emily exchanges are interrupted by flashbacks to that night, when Bobby and the much younger Dave (Daniel Marconi), both married but feeling the considerable distance from their wives, indulge in increasingly inebriated flirting with Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski), Belfast lasses who seem very much interested. Actually, they're IRA operatives, hence the titular honey trap: They mean to lure Dave and Bobby into IRA gunmen's hands. Dave, after a drunken call with his wife that sobers him up a bit, repairs to the barracks, urging Bobby to run off with the girls, leaving Dave with a rage and guilty conscience that haven't healed all these decades since. This scene is replayed later as it really happened, not as Dave told it to Emily, and his edits reveal a lot about him.

Complicated bloke, Dave: a swaggerer, a good talker, charming when he wants to be–but mercurial, and given to refining or sidestepping the truth. And consumed by anger about the past in general and that night in particular. So when Emily accidentally divulges that her previous interviews may contain some revelations about Bobby's still-unsolved murder, he's roused to less-than-scrupulous action.

That's essentially the first act. The past-present intermingling could be neater, the details about how Dave finds out what he does clearer. But we're in for a blistering second act, where Dave has located one of the girls (now Samantha Mathis) and is pretending to romance her to uncover the whole truth. I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, but let's say he meets her in the coffee shop she owns, takes her to dinner, gets her up to his hotel room, and...

The tension here becomes scorching, the sort where you lean forward in your seat in anticipation of what's going to happen next. Much of that is due to the consummate interplay of Mathis and Hayden, for whom Dave constitutes a career high. His line readings are precise and characterful, his facial reactions a road map of the hell Dave is going through, his body language the physical vocabulary of an outwardly confident alpha male masking a wounded soul; and you can easily see how Marconi, the younger version of Dave, would turn into Hayden. Mathis plays splendidly opposite him, conjuring up a self-sufficient woman reluctant to confront her long-ago life. Tipping is an ideal Bobby, a handsome but unsure young lad taking his cues from Dave; they're very touchy-feely army buddies, triggering a possible subtext that's best left ambiguous.

Matt Torney writes in his director's note how he grew up in Belfast and witnessed the Troubles firsthand, and "this play is not an essay about history, but an exploration of these vast and aching secret worlds that live within us all, but especially within those who have survived or experienced trauma." The characters' inner turmoils are laid bare for us, and we're left to contemplate the wreckage of Irish vs. British, Protestant vs. Catholic, Loyalist vs. Republican, and the futility of any attempts at reconciliation.

Charlie Corcoran, who usually does such good scenic design for Irish Rep, makes some curious choices here. It's basically a deep unit set, two upstage doorways and another stage right, with a paisley rug that only makes you wonder what it's doing there. The pub where Dave and Bobby meet Lisa and Kirsty doesn't much resemble a pub, and the many other locations are only hinted at. Michael Gottlieb compensates somewhat with moody lighting, such as putting characters in spotlight when they're in the principals' minds, and James Garver's sound design keeps the voices natural while clearly providing whatever additional noises are needed.

McGann provides romcom elements early on–look, four hot young things flirting–that we know will give way to tragic events, and he keeps us anxious about the outcome to the very end. There's history in The Honey Trap, but there are also fully fleshed out characters whose fates we come to care about. This is one of the strongest new plays Irish Rep has offered in a good long while.