And the barman asked me if I was alright? Simple little question. And I said I was. And he said he’d make me a sandwich. And I said, okay. And I nearly started crying–because you know, here was someone just… doing this for me.
The Weir
It’s a cold, windy evening in the depths of rural Ireland. A turntable moves to reveal the set of Sarah Bacon’s Pub. Rustic and familiar and timeless, this is a pub that could just as easily exist in its exact form today or a hundred years ago. The thirty-year-old car parked outside offers the only indication of time we have. Entering the scene are a landlord and his regulars. The conversation is stilted and unremarkable. That is until Valerie, a vivacious young woman from Dublin arrives. From here, the conversation takes fantastical and unexpected turns: we hear of ghost stories, the ‘fairy road’, and other mysterious happenings. However, one particularly harrowing story comes to light, giving the regulars more than they bargained for and audiences something they won’t easily forget.
Written by award winning playwright Conor McPherson, The Weir serves as a tonic for the dark, winter evenings at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The production, directed by Caitriona McLaughlin, takes the audience into an intimate space, of fast-flowing conversation, oscillating between the extremities of humour and pathos. There’s Jack (Brendan Coyle), a wry, world-weary figure, Jim (Marty Rea), more soft-spoken and dim-witted and the pub owner, Brendan, (Séan Fox) who goes through the motions, lending an ear to every confession. They’re joined by the savvy and spritely, Finbar (Peter Coonan) and Valerie (Jolly Abraham) an educated American immigrant, who’s a fish out of water in a setting like this.
The subject matter is complemented by a series of subtle production choices that create an unnerving and eery tone. The lone car parked outside in the dark. The whistling of the wind. The solemn sound of the fiddle. Rob Moloney’s sound design and Jane Cox’s lighting design succeed in creating an undertone of discomfort – the sense that something bad will happen but you’re not sure exactly what it is. The inclination, as an audience member, is to lean into the stories being told like one of the regulars on a bar stool. You drink every word, of what is a very monologue driven play.
McPherson’s tale is in many respects, a microcosm of the story of Ireland. It conveys the sense that storytelling is baked into our bones, the need to wax lyrical over just about anything: the farm, sandwiches, Mary up the road or the odd ghost tale for a little injection of drama. Stories capture the past like little else and can help us make sense of things as we move forward. They’re also like a blanket, a haven that can stave off the bleakness of reality, if only momentarily. These stories also help to peel back the cloth of Irish identity. The story of Ireland is the story of many things: Celtic tradition, occupation, and conflict as examples. Peel back a little more and you get a portrait of death, loneliness, the supernatural and most pointedly here, migration.
The eponymous ‘Weir’ of the play is featured in a framed photograph hanging up on the wall of the Pub. It’s a black and white photo from 1951, marvelled at by the regulars, as this grand piece of engineering that helped to generate electricity for the local area. It represents the central metaphor of the play – a river, once fast, flowing, and full of energy, is stunted by a dam. Some of the water makes it through and flows on, while the rest of it tails off into a backwater. And so, it goes with people. Finbarr left the backwater years prior for a better life up in Dublin – now returning home a more well-adjusted man. However, for Jack, Jim and co who stayed put all this time, life has passed them by. The message is those who migrate, progress, and grow, while those who stay, stagnate and decay.
The performances on show are layered, nuanced, and expertly delivered. Jack’s long pauses, Brendan’s naivete, Jim’s mumbling, Finbarr’s overstepping of personal boundaries, and Valerie’s giddy apprehension – nothing here is out of place. The banter between the characters gives otherwise weighty subjects a kind of levity and accessibility for the viewing audience. As the play unfolds, you also get the sense that humour is used in dialogue as a defence mechanism against the harsh realities of life. Once we hear Valerie’s revelation, the wall of false pretences is quickly torn down. As the night draws to a close, the only thing left standing is the truth, which for some, is hard to look at in the eye.
The Weir is all about suggestion: All the pieces of the puzzle are out in front of you, but it’s your job to put them together. Where this production play stumbles, is in its over reliance on the words alone to tell the story. Some key insights are buried in lengthy monologues, which could go over peoples’ heads. Perhaps a re-enacting of the ghost stories could have made for a more dynamic production of what is a subtle and cerebral play.
Overall, the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Weir makes for an absorbing, entertaining and thought provoking spectacle.