Dateline: DUBLIN, Ireland – THERE’S WONDERFUL PLEASURE to be had in seeing a cultural institution doing effectively exactly what it should be doing.
Ireland’s national theater, The Abbey, founded in 1904 by the poet W.B. Yeats along with dramatist and cultural campaigner, Lady (Isabella Augusta) Gregory, whom George Bernard Shaw called “the greatest living Irishwoman,” is currently breathing fresh and confident life into an Irish modern classic: Conor McPherson’s The Weir.
The production opens captivatingly with a pair of lights barely piercing clouds of dry-ice theatrical fog, until they gradually resolve into an engaging emblem for run-down living.
The emblem is a beaten up car with failing headlights, possibly in the auto-shop for repair, upon whose hood a fiddler (Courtney Cullen) reclines. She plays a plaintive solo melody that contrives to be lilting too. This arresting tableau never features in the on-stage action; from the sidelines only, the fiddle music will lyrically, and unobtrusively, underpin all the shifting moods of the evening, lightly underscored with discrete percussion from a bodhrán played by Éamonn Cagney.
The shabby car is strictly relevant only in that the first actual character to arrive is a car-repair man, Jack (Brendan Coyle). He may be a mechanic, but he wears a suit, possibly relevant to the character’s mixed motives.
The play has a familiar Irish structure. It’s set in a bar. Four customers each tell a story, but in a way that their taking turns to narrate is made to seem utterly natural. The barman Brendan (Sean Fox) does not contribute an actual tale, but he does offer gentle, humane commentary on occasions, as befits a barkeep. Pregnant pauses provide added heft in the careful pacing throughout, offering us chances for thoughtful reflection.
Small, quiet rituals are deliberately but wordlessly observed, like the mere striking and sharing of a match by cast-members who smoke. This also serves to single out the locally prominent businessman, Finbar, played by Peter Coonan, who we learn has given up cigarettes for a significant reason. The sole woman, the community’s newcomer, Valerie (Jolly Abraham) takes off her jacket, puts it on the back of a chair, and hangs a purse on it too. The only purse in the place, of course. A seemingly empty piece of stage business that is not empty at all.
Possibly the most poignant moment comes after that lone woman has told her own hard-to-hear story of loss, along with an inexplicable, mysterious aftermath. The somewhat shambolic Jim (Marty Rea) who until this point has provided the most shocking story (but who also punctured any solemnity in the air with some comic sharpness) takes his awkward leave of Valerie. He utters a heartfelt expression of empathy with Valerie. Rarely can such humble phrases been invested with so much feeling:
I’m very sorry about what’s happened to you … You enjoy your peace and quiet here, now … You’re very nice. Goodnight now.
The Abbey’s Artistic Director Catriona McLaughlin has pulled off a skillful, rewarding mingling of the profound and often hilariously wry. She and her cast and crew have done full justice to playwright McPherson’s own account of the piece’s origins: “Fact, fiction, history, ghosts, religion and hearsay, all woven together,” that he first heard at his grandfather’s knee.
What succeeds above all is McPherson’s language. That quintessential Irish oral tradition, with its yoking of pathos and humor in almost equal measure. One particular line echoed resonantly for me long after leaving the theater. Jim’s Mammy, it was explained to the newcomer Valerie, is dying: “She’s been fading fast, like, for years.”
“The Weir” plays at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin until January 14th 2023
