The play is called A Night in November – and the participation of Irish actor Frank Talbot (Letters of a Matchmaker) ensures that the production coming this Sunday afternoon in November (Nov. 22, 2 p.m.) to the upstairs bar of the White Rock Elks Club, 1469 George Street, will be equally memorable.

The Vancouver-based Talbot has performed the one-man tour-de-force countless times over the last 10 years and there hasn’t been one time when it hasn’t been greeted with a standing ovation at the end.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said, his self-deprecating humour given the added twist of a lilting brogue.

“Maybe it’s that this one guy has gone on talking for 2½ hours without stopping. One of these days it won’t happen and I’ll be bothered by it. I’ll think ‘what have I done wrong?’”

A Night In November, written by Irish playwright Marie Jones (Stones In His Pockets), gives Talbot plenty of scope in depicting no less than 23 different characters – from men and women to children – in the story of what happens when a man attends a crucial World Cup playoff match in Belfast in 1993.

It was an infamous real-life game – pitting a team from the Irish Republic against a Northern Irish side – in which the Republic only needed to score a draw to move on to World Cup play in New York, but the Northern Ireland team, while unable to move on themselves, could spoil the southerners’ hopes.

It became, in Talbot’s words, “a disgusting display of hatred and bigotry in which the fans were out of control and even the southern manager – Jackie Charlton – and the northern manager came to blows on the field.”

Around this true event, Jones has woven the fictional story of the central character, who has taken his father-in-law – the epitome of “every bigot in Northern Ireland” – to the match.

The main character, not a soccer fan himself, doesn’t start out as very likeable either. But he has an epiphany as a result of the match, Talbot said.

“This is one guy who has woken up and smelled the coffee.”

While Talbot can’t say for certain, he believes Jones herself attended the fateful match and wrote her own reactions into the piece – “I think she’s the lead character.”

Jones describes the play as a black comedy – a description Talbot tends to resist as suggesting a joke-driven piece. But there is definitely humour in its approach to some very serious issues, he said.

“It’s not funny, but you’ll find yourself laughing at something inappropriate, and then she’ll make you feel guilty about it.”

Jones has also created something of an actor’s dream, with a rich range of characters that can be suggested with a few gestures and adjustments of vocal timbre and accent, Talbot said.

“The northern and southern Irish accents are quite different,” he noted.

Talbot was himself born in the Republic of Ireland, in Sallynoggin, a small hamlet outside of the seaside port of Dun Laoghaire.

A policeman for 10 years, he later went to sea and then was employed on the technical staff for a secondary school in Scotland, where he met his wife, Moira, and settled down to raise a family of five girls.

It was in Scotland’s lively drama club scene that he first acquired his taste for theatre – something that he and Moira carried with them when they emigrated to Canada, founding The Wild Rose Players in Calgary.

Later founders of the Celtic Troubadours of Calgary, Talbot and his wife moved to Vancouver in 2006 and took up residence at the Performing Arts Lodge, where they continue to produce shows.

It was Talbot’s eldest daughter, who now lives in Los Angeles, who first drew his attention to the play some 12 years ago, he said.

“She saw a reading of it in a pub venue in Venice, California, and told me ‘Dad, you have to get this play.’”

As soon as he read it, he knew it was a winning piece of material.

“When you’re in the acting business, if it doesn’t grab you in the first act, you don’t bother reading the rest of it, because you can see the audience sitting there bored. But this one grabbed me from the get-go.”

Talbot said he gained insight into the bare-bones appeal of the show one night while talking to a patron after playing a major Calgary theatre.

“He said he knew he was coming to a three-act play, and the first thing he noticed was there was nothing on stage. And then, he said, ‘you walk out, dressed in black – and with respect, you’re no spring chicken’. But then I asked him ‘at what point did you buy into it?’ – and he said ‘oh, about 30 seconds in.’”

A Night In November carries a warning of “some mature language.” Tickets ($10) are available from the Elk’s Club (604-538-4016) or Kathy (604-536-7723).