A ferry terminal in steely morning light is the bare setting for Deirdre Kinahan’s poignant drama of return, as a man (Michael Glenn Murphy) in overcoat, suit and hat clutches a suitcase and considers his next move. In the 50 years since he left Ireland on a misguided impulse, Joseph Grace has never been back until now.

As a bus pulls up, he hesitates and turns away, assailed by memories. What follows in Louise Lowe’s atmospheric staging for Once Off Productions is a reckoning with Joseph’s past: a life swept up in 20th-century Europe’s upheavals, from the Western Front, to Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade of war prisoners in Germany in 1915, to the rise of Hitler.

Kinahan has previously dramatised the Irish revolutionary years, deploying archival sources to gripping effect. Here she writes acutely about complex loyalties among Irishmen serving in the British army in the first world war, but the historical research is less well absorbed overall.

Joseph’s years in Weimar Berlin are not fully convincing, despite Murphy’s gleeful performance, as Joseph finds sexual freedom in the gaudy dazzle of the cabarets. That he should later join the proto-fascist Freikorps seems improbable, especially for a man who has had his fill of violence. While Joseph is depicted as a survivor, who can change his name and his allegiances if necessary, he seems far too gentle and sensitive to be some kind of ironic anti-hero – though that might have been an interesting twist.

Instead, he was an accidental soldier, then a reluctant – failed – revolutionary, whose happiest years were in 1950s London with his English lover. Still grieving for him, Joseph is now unmoored, his predicament as a permanent exile calling to mind some of Sebastian Barry’s lost souls and Beckett’s ruminators; belonging nowhere, a lonely figure, hovering on a threshold.