When Tommy Black, an unemployed young man from a Protestant neighborhood in Belfast, opens his mouth, what often comes out is dialogue lifted intact from the James Cagney movies he spends his spare time studying on home video. Tommy, who lives with his widowed mother and dour brother in a working-class neighborhood, is the highly symbolic main character in Kenneth Branagh's Public Enemy. The play takes place in the mid-1980s, when the strife in Belfast was at it worst. One way Tommy has avoided being caught up in the warfare that divides the city is by spinning a fantasy of himself as a latter-day Cagney character. In the play's opening scene, he wins a talent contest in a bar by doing an impersonation of the Hollywood legend singing and dancing Yankee Doodle Dandy But it quickly becomes clear that Tommy's identification with Cagney is more than a crowd-pleasing daydream. It is an obsession that has spun dangerously out of control.