THERE JUST TWO KINDS of people who’ll be denied a life-beyond-death, we are told in the newly-opened Broadway staging of Jez Butterworth’s sinewy Northern Irish Troubles-based play The Ferryman.
They are “the unburied – and liars”, says a character who serves as a cultural and moral conscience of the play. He’s Uncle Patrick Carney of the large County Armagh farming family, the Carneys, whose trials are sympathetically traced through the wrenching events of one day.
It’s harvest-time – and as the last of the season’s wheat is brought in, it’s the day of their harvest feast, and family members living in the farmhouse are joined by young male cousins for the extra heavy work and the traditional meal.
But the seasonal joyousness is to be dramatically undercut – as is telegraphed in a short menacing prologue that takes place the day before, and in a very different location.
It’s a hardline IRA-controlled part of Derry city, with the sound of British army helicopters above and Republican graffiti on blackened walls. Prominent is the name ‘Bobby’, and there are other names too. They refer, though this isn’t spelled out yet, to incarcerated IRA hunger-strikers, led by Bobby Sands. This is 1981, and Sands was the first of ten men to starve themselves to death in a protest demanding “political” instead of criminal status. Support for the strikers among the Catholic community even led to Sands being elected to the British Parliament; he died without taking his seat. Their demands were resisted by an implacable British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Such is the tension overall, province-wide – and the Carney family in particular have lost a member in uncertain circumstances. He’s the unseen Seamus, brother to the paterfamilias Quinn Carney – played by Paddy Considine (right, with two Carney children) who is known for film and TV work, but is here making a commanding stage debut. Seamus has been missing for 10 years, and this harvest feast-day is when his fate finally becomes known.
The lies told around and following Seamus’ disappearance, and the IRA’s role in it – plus other characters’ own ways of “vanishing”, as the author’s skillful wordplay fashions it – create intricate and compelling patterns to the play … through many swiveling turns of revelation as three long but always intense acts unfold.
MARK LAMBERT AS UNCLE PAT treads a cunning path between an entertaining Irish buffoon, and a Classics-imbued font of wisdom. His instructive focus on ‘the unburied and liars’ comes from Virgil, as he recalls Aeneas’ trip to the Underworld, and Charon’s role as “The Ferryman”, ensuring that dead souls get across the River Styx and find eternal rest on its far shore.
There’s an AUNT Pat, too, a female balance to the male. While Patrick represents a characteristic Irish respect for classical learning (and the worth of England-based literature, too – the Irish, including Pat, are among the world’s strongest supporters of Shakespeare), his sister Patricia, stingingly performed by Dearbhla Molloy, embodies another strong Irish tradition. The deeply reverent and sometimes violent longing for self-rule and full nationhood.
Another Aunt – yes, another one – is called Aunt Maggie Gone-Away, and she is just that. With dementia well set in, she fulfills the function – in Fionnula Flanagan’s typically masterful handling – of a Greek chorus signaling the fates of those around her, to great comic effect sometimes, with profound foreboding at others.
Sisters-in-law Mary and Caitlin are wives respectively to Quinn and the missing Seamus. And the actors who inhabit these roles (respectively again, Genevieve O’Reilly and Laura Donnelly) edgily play out – often separately and once, grippingly, together – their taut relationship. Caitlin’s husband’s disappearance has led to her subsequent adoption into Quinn’s household, as “a young, beautiful woman” in Mary’s own words, along with Caitlin’s quasi-orphaned son Oisin (an agonizing young Rob Malone).
His disappearance has also led also to Mary’s virtual “vanishing” from the family, too – though she manages to keep on producing babies. The latest (called Bobby in implied honor to the dead Republican hero) makes a delighting appearance – a real human baby, no fakery! (There are also real rabbits, and a real goose, by the way.) All the other young human actors, playing the Carney children, are altogether a triumphant platoon, not least in their creative, and totally age-inappropriate profanities.
I saw The Ferryman in London’s West End. For the transfer here in New York, director Sam Mendes seems to have devoted some more time to ironing out wrinkles that previously bothered me. Most of all, on Broadway I was much more thoroughly convinced by the character of Jimmy Muldoon, the IRA leader. In London he and his acolytes/bodyguards seemed like caricatured heavies. But here, Stuart Graham (right, with Considine, far right) invests the role with not just menace, but a surprising – and necessary – degree of apparent decency and confident human understanding.
For all the anti-colonial force of the play, I should point out the presence – as the IRA gunmen do, too, in their more sinister fashion – of one lone, and huge, English person. I’m not counting the obdurate voice, on the radio, of Maggie Thatcher. No, England is represented in person by the somewhat feeble-minded farmhand Tom Kettle, and he’s played, irresistably, by the endearing Justin Edwards.
‘The Ferryman‘ plays at the Bernard B Jacobs Theatre, 242 West 45th Street, NYC
