The Ferryman
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
It’s courageous of the director Andrew Flynn and Gaiety Productions to import The Ferryman, Jez Butterworth’s blockbuster from 2017, to Dublin. Since premiering in London, and running on Broadway, the play has resembled an explainer about the Troubles for people outside the island. Will an Irish audience find its report overly familiar?
Set in 1980s Armagh, the drama has its centre in Caitlin (a well-judged Charlene McKenna), who, since her husband went missing 10 years ago, has taken shelter in the farmhouse of her brother-in-law Quinn (a built protector, played by Aaron McCusker) and his extended family of aunts and children.
A discovery that her husband is one of the Disappeared – those abducted and buried – invites a visit from an image-conscious republican criminal (Laurence Kinlan, making every casual observation sound like a threat). Nationalist politics has gone mainstream since the 1981 hunger strikes.
Butterworth has not only read up on the era; he seems intent on performing the plot points of an actual Irish play. With the family swept up in an annual harvest festival, anticipating the escape of ritual, the play echoes Dancing at Lughnasa, with one scene of all-out dancing even getting interrupted by a lost radio signal. In such moments Butterworth seems to be tipping his hat to Brian Friel.
Forget the gym: Here’s four fitness lessons from around the world
An Irishman at Oxford: It was an education in being an outsider. I felt alienated from the very start
My brother Ian Bailey: ‘He pleaded his case and begged me to keep in touch, and I did’
Diary of a retrofit: It cost €60,000 but it is worth every cent
Everything is impossibly lively in early scenes, as each member of the near-infinite family (a huge cast of 23), and some of their farm animals (including a real goose), makes their entrance. A national reputation for clerical hypocrisy and outrageous vulgarity comes from obtuse angles: a corruptible priest is introduced by a rhyming republican henchman; a nine-year-old exclaims in shock: “F**k me blue!”
Then, when the family’s own history of republican violence is revealed, the play begins to resemble a series of Wikipedia searches. As a distantly senile aunt played by Brid Ní Neachtain (given the woeful name Aunt Faraway) becomes lucid to recount scenes from the 1916 Rising, Butterworth drops in an insistent roll-call of revolutionaries, a list of Irish counties and a roundabout reference to banshees, as if intent on including all the fruits of his research.
With scenes increasingly interrupted by random singsongs, including belting renditions of tunes by The Dubliners and The Wolfe Tones, it verges on the Micksploitation of being here just for the sake of doing something Irish.
Most unforgivable is the final act. (The cast is not to blame: please get everyone here to work together again.) Butterworth has Caitlin flip-flop on her secret desire for Quinn, who himself seems to extend the horrors of the Disappeared into an uneasy metaphor about his own cooled-off marriage, claiming that his wife (Sarah Morris, deserving much better) has “vanished”.
It all ends somewhere that seems cynically bleak and contrivedly mythical. Friel was a misdirection for Butterworth; Stewart Parker’s 1987 masterpiece Pentecost is the definitive statement about this era. There, a grieving antiques dealer caught in riots, and seeking refuge in the untouched home of a dead loyalist woman who would likely hate their guts, has a profound moment with their grief. It ends not surrounded by the squawk of banshees but with the throwing open of windows, an awesome beam of sunlight: “I want to live. We owe it to our innocent dead.”
The Ferryman is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, March 15th
