Special to The Telegram

Don’t be fooled by the disarmingly romantic title from the Ella Fitzgerald song. Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me is a gritty and intense psychodrama about three men held hostage by a militant Islamic faction in Beirut.

The setting is a windowless cell, with high, rough-cast backwall, in which a Californian doctor, a Dublin journalist, and a British academic are imprisoned in filthy conditions — not knowing day from night, and not knowing if or when they will be executed by their unseen captors. Their only crime is to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The prisoners exercise body and mind to combat the oppressive boredom and spirit-sapping fear of months of meaningless imprisonment under threat of death.

They read from the only books provided — the Bible and the Koran. They reminisce about sports, movies, family, sex, religion. They sing songs, tell stories, recite poems, argue about history and politics, or write imaginary letters home.

Mutually interdependent for psychological survival, they nevertheless rub one another raw in their intimate need and reciprocal hostilities.

Except for one closing ritual, they never touch one another, yet the shifting dynamic of their inter-relationships is subtly developed and the differing backgrounds and contrastive temperament of the three characters are expertly delineated.

Here are three very choice acting parts, to which three performers do full justice.

Mike Coady is spontaneous and affecting as the earnest young American doctor who finally breaks down under the strain of confinement and the threat of death. Kevin Lewis anchors the play as the garrulous, self-dramatizing, sentimental, joke-cracking Irishman. But, eventually, he breaks too.

Fred Hawksley is the third and last captive: a fussily pedantic British professor with a mother in Peterborough, who nevertheless demonstrates unexpectedly stubborn strength. Like the Irishman, he is something of a stereotype, perhaps, but the types are so richly imbued with humanity that you realize you know somebody just like them.

Given the dramatic premise, you do not expect comedy. Surprisingly, the script is interlaced with grim humour and defiant gaiety, as the prisoners needle one another, tell jokes, or develop elaborate fantasies to cling to their humanity in intolerable circumstances. Sometimes episodes veer towards plucking of heartstrings, and occasional stretches might be emotionally over-coloured.

But — especially in the close quarters of the LSPU Hall — there is no denying and no resisting the emotional and imaginative power of this compelling production illustrating the survival of human dignity in the face of adversity.