The Smuggler: Theatre & Whiskey at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/164

Some nights at Belfast Whiskey Week defy easy categorisation, and the evening of 24th July 2025 was emphatically one of them. Event 90 — a special late run of Ronán Noone's award-winning The Smuggler — brought together the uisce beatha and the dramatic arts in The Harrison's sleek new bar, pairing a rhymed one-man thriller with cocktails, whiskey donuts, fine drams, and a communal punch that felt like something lifted from the seanchas of an older, more mischievous Ireland. It was, in the truest sense of the word, an event.

About This Event

Written entirely in rhymed verse, Ronán Noone’s award-winning play, the Smuggler, is a 75-minute tour de force that packs a punch! And in keeping with our Whiskey Festival – we will have Cocktails, Whiskey Donuts and Chocolates, Fine Drams & even a Punch of our own to share at the Harrison.

In the fabulous new bar at the Harrison, you’ll be front and centre of this explosive one man show.

Synopsis
The Smuggler is a Thriller in Rhyme. It's 2025. Tim Finnegan is an Irish immigrant trying to make it as a writer on Amity, an affluent summer colony in Massachusetts, where tensions flare between the migrant and local communities after a fatal car crash. When he loses his job as a bartender, Tim gets drawn into the dark underbelly of the island. The Smuggler examines how far one man will go to restore his self-respect and asks the question, "What does it mean to be an American citizen today?"
"Terrific one-man, one-act play. The tale Tim tells is raw and raucous - part Sopranos, part Archie Bunker and Noone has plenty to say about immigration."
The New Yorker, Feb 2023.

Looking Back

The Harrison is an elegant bar at the heart of Belfast city centre — refined without being stiff, the kind of place that takes its whiskey seriously but never forgets it's there for good company. On this particular Thursday evening it was transformed into something closer to a speakeasy theatre: guests settled front and centre in the new bar space, drams in hand, as the lights dropped and Tim Finnegan stepped into the room. Noone's play is set in 2025, on Amity — a wealthy summer colony off the Massachusetts coast — and its central tension, between the Irish immigrant trying to make his way as a writer and the insular community around him, landed with an immediacy that felt anything but fictional.

The conceit of The Smuggler — a full thriller written entirely in rhymed verse — might sound like a parlour trick on paper, but in performance it was revelatory. The rhythm drove the narrative forward like a current under dark water, and Noone's text packed the kind of raw energy that The New Yorker rightly described as part Sopranos, part Archie Bunker. For an audience already warmed by a dram or two, the rhyme scheme had an almost hypnotic pull, drawing people deeper into Tim's descent into the island's darker world. At seventy-five minutes, it never outstayed its welcome — it punched clean and left a mark.

Of course, Belfast Whiskey Week has never believed that whiskey lives in a vacuum, and the curation around the performance was characteristically considered. The whiskey punch — shared communally, as punches ought to be — set a convivial tone before the play began, while the whiskey-infused donuts and chocolates offered a playful counterpoint to the drama unfolding on stage. The cocktail list felt genuinely celebratory rather than merely decorative. It was the kind of pairing that reminded you why the festival commissions experiences like this: the glass and the story belong together, the way duchas and place belong together, rooted and inseparable. Those who caught one of the other Smuggler performances during the week will know the play itself was consistent and powerful, but there was something particular about the intimacy of this Harrison staging that gave it a quality all its own.

This was a commissioned event, which means Belfast Whiskey Week took a genuine creative risk in bringing it to the programme — and the risk paid off handsomely. Theatre and whiskey have long shared an interest in truth-telling, in stripping away pretence and asking uncomfortable questions. Noone's central question — what does it mean to be an American citizen today? — is one that resonates far beyond Massachusetts, and in a city that knows something about contested belonging and the complexity of identity, it found a receptive audience. The Harrison, for its part, proved itself more than equal to the occasion: a space that can hold elegance and rawness at the same time is a rare and valuable thing.

If you're curious about the broader texture of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025, the Whiskey Map gives a sense of how much ground the festival covered across the city. And for those who like their drams alongside something unexpected and thought-provoking — something with a sheugh of mischief running through it — keep an eye on what the festival commissions next year. Events like this one are proof that the best whiskey evenings don't just taste good; they linger, like a long finish, long after you've left the room. Sláinte mhaith to everyone who was there, and to Ronán Noone for a piece of writing that thoroughly deserved its night in Belfast.