Appearances are deceptive. On the face of it, The Weir is not an exceptional play. Set in a rural pub somewhere in north-west Ireland, it is naturalistic and familiar. It does not call for fanciful interpretations or big directorial statements. Even its author, Conor McPherson, seems ambivalent. “It was just people talking, so it shouldn’t have worked,” he once observed.
Audiences who saw JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 would have recognised the bar stools, the fireplace and the sleepy camaraderie. They would have sensed the timeless smell of peat and whiskey. So too would they have recognised the locals: practical men, variously shy, garrulous and funny, who are joined by an outsider, a mysterious woman from Dublin. They shuffle in, have a few drinks, share stories, then leave.
But such a prosaic description does no justice to McPherson’s play. For all its everyday trappings, The Weir takes a mesmerising hold. Audiences find it electrifying. The critic Michael Billington called its opening performance “one of those nights no one who was there will ever forget”. He included it among The 101 Greatest Plays, alongside Oedipus the King, Macbeth and Long Day’s Journey Into Night. What stood out, he said, was McPherson’s “narrative power, his gift for language and his ability to excavate the quiet desperation of the unfulfilled”.
Ian Rickson’s production opened in 1997 at London’s Royal Court Upstairs (in exile at the Ambassadors theatre), and transferred to the Duke of York’s, where it ran for two years. Broadway came next. McPherson, only 25 when it opened, won Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle awards.
The Weir has duly attracted prestigious actors, the latest of whom, Brendan Gleeson, is about to play the mechanic Jack, in a production directed by McPherson in Dublin and London. Gleeson, star of The Banshees of Inisherin, calls the play “profoundly moving, inspiring and ultimately hopeful”.
First played by Jim Norton, Jack is one of the regulars in a rudimentary pub. Like barman Brendan and sidekick Jim, he is single – a reason to be prickly when the married Finbar, a hotelier, takes it upon himself to show around Valerie, a blow-in from Dublin. Taking it in turns to attempt to impress the stranger, the men spin supernatural stories. They are silenced when she then tells a devastating story of her own.
Julia Ford was the first to play Valerie, performing for 60 people behind the curtain on the Ambassadors stage. “It was the most intimate play I’ve ever been involved in,” she says. “It was like they were in the bar with you. You were not really acting, just talking in a pub. After the first preview, people were really moved and saying, ‘God, that was amazing.’ It’s a special play.”
Behind the surface realism, The Weir has a haunting appeal. “Mystery is the philosophical underpinning of life,” McPherson once told me. “We don’t understand who we are or where we come from. A fear of the unknown is very exciting on stage.”
Ardal O’Hanlon warms to that idea. He played Jim, alongside Brian Cox and Dervla Kirwan, in Josie Rourke’s 2013 production for London’s Donmar. “It lives in that liminal space between the mundane and the ineffable,” says the actor. “It lives between past and present, natural and supernatural. There’s real depth to it. It’s an Irish thing: there is a healthy respect for the unknown, the mysterious and the supernatural in Ireland. Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not there.”
Lucianne McEvoy recognises that setting well. She played Valerie in Amanda Gaughan’s production at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum in 2016 and knows exactly the kind of bar-cum-talking-shop McPherson had in mind. “My dad lived in the west of Ireland for the last 15 years of his life and was very much adopted by his Mayo family,” says the actor, currently appearing in Sing Street at the Lyric Hammersmith.
“His pub was Inche’s bar in Ballinrobe. His little stool was kept for him. When I would visit, I would get an honorary stool pulled up beside him. The same characters were all along the bar and had the same amount of pints. It was like a ritual. If you were there, it was an honour to be there. Valerie probably felt very welcomed into that secret place.”
That welcome is part of the play’s emotional pull. Valerie, a woman in an all-male space, not only acts as a catalyst for the men’s stories, but feels comfortable enough to reveal her own sad tale of loss. “If she was real, I’m glad she happened to go into that bar,” says Ford.
Valerie was even more of an outsider in Caitríona McLaughlin’s production at Dublin’s Abbey three years ago. Then, she was played by Jolly Abraham, a New Yorker who now lives in Ireland. With McPherson’s blessing and a judicious tweak of the script, she played Valerie as newly arrived from Chicago.
“I’ve been in an old man’s pub in Ireland, so I know what that feeling is,” says Abraham, back in rehearsal with McLaughlin for The Boy at the Abbey. “As a woman, you know Brendan, Finbar and Jack are all putting on a bit of a show. Valerie is amused by who’s peacocking and who’s not, but also how everything being said is freeing her from her past.”
The stories also draw in the audience. McPherson calls storytelling “the most pure moment of theatre”, one that demands our engagement. “What’s brilliant about the theatre is the audience is willing to do that work,” he said when I interviewed him in 2013. “We are willing to go into what I call a collective trance. It probably goes to the nature of consciousness itself. We’re constantly putting order on the chaos.”
O’Hanlon agrees: “Storytelling is central to human existence. It’s how we process the world. The form of storytelling in The Weir creates a little bit of a distance from your own experience. You protect yourself by couching your experience in terms of a story. Jim’s story is dark and disturbing, and you get the sense it is about something that happened to him in a way that he hasn’t fully acknowledged.”
Abraham picks up the theme: “Storytelling, whether it’s a myth, or ‘Once upon a time …’, or something that happened to you on the metro, you as the person speaking need to get it out, but you as a listener are also trying to find a way to connect, relate and latch on. All those people in that pub need to be heard and seen. It’s primal.”
“Conor has a great ear for dialogue,” says O’Hanlon. “It’s not just the rhythm and the beautiful use of language, it’s the jokes. He is a hilarious writer. As a standup myself, given that the play is in part a series of monologues, where each character gets their turn to shine, that’s something that I relish. I could really bring those standup chops to the set-piece story Jim tells: a shocking, inappropriate twist on the ghost story.”
McEvoy also relished McPherson’s language: “It’s such a joy. You pay attention to the rhythms, the punctuation and how he phrases things. Valerie’s monologue is long and you have to let one thought lead you to another. If you trust the writing, it’s not about memorising it in a linear fashion, it’s about being in each moment and trusting that the next moment will come. They’ll line up. He’s in the train of thought with you.”
Ford says that this play that is supposedly “just people talking” is anything but. “This is why I think Conor is a genius,” she says. “It is the combination of simplicity with themes that just go on and on. It’s about all the things we go through: grief, loneliness, loss, the need for other human beings. I feel quite moved saying it: the raw, immediate, essence of what humanity is. And one of the most basic human needs is storytelling.”
For McEvoy, storytelling is what brings together the characters and, in turn, the audience: “In sharing the stories they are unburdened of something and we feel more connected. As a metaphor, that’s what theatre is: we come together, we don’t know most of the people around us, and we agree to bear witness to these mysteries.”