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by Jez Butterworth, directed by Sam Mendes

Royal Court Theatre, Gielgud Theatre, London, GBR

June 29, 2017-May 19, 2018

“Where glory recommends the grief,

Despair distrusts the healing”

(“The Silent Lover” by Sir Walter Raleigh)

If you see only one play in London this autumn, make sure it is The Ferryman.  When tickets went on sale for the play’s premiere run at the Royal Court Theatre in spring this year, the show sold out in a single day, the fastest sale in Royal Court history.  The first reason for this is that the play is by Jez Butterworth, whose previous play was Jerusalem a large-scale realistic play with a strong symbolic and supernatural component that in pre-Brexit days captured the notion of England on the verge of abandoning its heritage.  The second reason is that the director is Sam Mendes, known for helming such West End productions as his highly influential Cabaret (1994), but best known now as the director the such films as American Beauty (1999) and two James Bond movies, Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015).

With The Ferryman, Butterworth has written the kind of play people have assumed was no longer possible – large-scale multigenerational tragedy.  The full company has 38 performers – 18 main adults, 7 covers, 12 children on rota and one infant, not to mention a live rabbit and a goose.  The play defiantly flouts the conventional wisdom that only small-scale plays are viable anymore in West End theatres.  The 3 hour play initially booking at the Gielgud Theatre to October 7 has already been extended to January 6, 2018.

Act 1 begins with a prologue in an urban setting where two thugs await the arrival of another character.  It is 1981 and excavations of ancient bodies preserved in the peat bogs nearby have turned up a man who has been dead for only ten years. He has been shot execution style and his dental records show him to be a Sean Carney, once a member of the IRA.  The man they have been waiting for surprisingly is a priest, Father Horrigan.  The chief thug Muldoon wants Horrigan to break the news of the discovery of the body to Caitlin Connelly, Sean’s wife, who has been mourning Sean’s death for the past ten years without the closure of knowing Sean is dead.  Caitlin has been living with the large family of Sean’s brother Quinn Carney and Muldoon wants Horrigan to pass on an important message to him, too.  What this is, we do not know.  All we know is that Horrigan agrees to undertake the task only when Muldoon as a threat shows him a pictures of Horrigan’s sister.

After this prologue the action takes place entirely in the large central room – kitchen, dining room, parlour – of Quinn Carney’s farm in rural Derry.  Rob Howell has designed the space with amazing naturalistic detail down to the brand of cigarettes that Aunt Pat smokes.  It is the day of the annual harvest feast and Caitlin is preparing a meal for the harvesters who will include the Carneys’ cousins and stocking supplies for the celebrations that will follow. 

The Carney household consists of three generations.  The older generation is represented by Quinn’s father Michael’s sisters, the staunch anti-English Pat and the demented Maggie, and his classics-quoting brother Pat.  Michael died in in his Aunt Pat’s arms during the famous Easter Rising of 1917.  The three siblings, though realistic characters, also function symbolically as the three Fates.  Aunt Pat, perpetually tuned into news on the radio and announcing the events to the family who ignore her, is an oracle of the present.  Uncle Pat, who liberally quotes from the classics of Greek, English and Irish literature when a parallel strikes him, is an oracle of the past.  Aunt Maggie, when she awakens briefly from her catatonic state, gives lively accounts of her own past and that of the family, but her special gift is telling the future.  As with the oracle of Delphi, she often leaves the listener with a riddle they need to solve.

The present generation is filled with conflict they mostly try to avoid.  Quinn’s relationship with Caitlin is ambiguous but so is his relationship with his own wife.  We know that Mary bore all of the children except for Oisin, who is Caitlin’s child.  Butterworth leads us to suppose that the father of Oisin, the only child who does not seem to fit in with the rest, may be Quinn, not Caitlin’s missing husband Sean.  In fact, his age makes him into a living symbol of Caitlin and Quinn’s possible relationship, Quinn’s betrayal of Mary and of Sean’s disappearance all of which are connected.  Two characters unrelated to the Carney’s also belong to this middle generation.  One is the IRA strongman Muldoon.  This other is a simpleton Englishman, Tom Kettle, who lives on Quinn’s property because Quinn’s father allowed him to do so when Tom was a boy.  Though likely a symbol of the English occupation of Northern Ireland, Tom gives the Carneys the windfall of apples from his tree and has the strange ability when not seeming mentally responsive to his surroundings of suddenly taking practical action when the Carneys cannot.

Most unusual in the play is the extensive representation of the younger generation.  Mary and Quinn have ten children, five boys and five girls,  who appear on stage from Michael, Jr., the oldest to the infant Bobby.  In addition Butterworth calls for the presence of three of their cousins the Corcorans, all boys.  By having the youth and child actors in the play outnumber the adults, Butterworth demonstrates how the decisions of the few and the old affect the many and the young.  Except for Oisin and the infant Bobby, all the young characters interact well until the subject of politics arises.  Members of all three generations know Muldoon.  Aunt Pat thinks of him as a hero for the cause of Ireland.  Quinn thinks of him as a threat to his happiness.  But the cousin Shane Corcoran, whom Muldoon recruited to be a spy, is proud of his connection with a powerful man, a power that Michael, Jr., like his father Quinn, believes should not be trusted. 

The first visitor to interrupt the Carneys’ festivities is Father Horrigan.  Both Caitlin and Quinn agree that the news of Sean’s death should be kept quiet until after the festival, but that fact, that changes their relationship and her reason for living with Quinn and his family, gets out anyway.  Horrigan’s other request causes Quinn to eject the priest from his house.  This expulsion leads to the arrival of Muldoon himself and is the catalyst for a series of revelations and actions that send the play irrevocably into the realm of tragedy.

Mendes’ direction of the enormous cast is exquisite.  The pacing of the action, the timing of the speeches, the nuanced acting he inspires are impeccable.  The entire cast functions as a single organism, all members working toward the single goal of opening our minds to a mystery involving the irony of the illusion of freedom and the invisible bonds of fate.  It is no accident that Butterworth has the Carney family hold their harvest feast on May 5, 1981, the same day that Bobby Sands dies in the Maze Prison of his hunger strike against British rule in Northern Ireland.

Part of the point of an ensemble play is that there is no star and the main source of tension in Butterworth’s play is that we don’t know for sure who among the Carneys is the target of Muldoon’s malice.  It is quite likely that the characters who will stay longest in audience members’ minds after they leave the show will be those who would ordinarily be considered secondary figures.  Chief among these is Dearbhla Molloy, who gives such a lived-in performance as Aunt Pat that you don’t think of her as acting at all.  Molloy makes her the prime irritant to peace in the Carney household – always stern, intolerant of others’ pleasure, living off an unlimited supply of anger.  Molloy gives her a single-mindedness that is both comic and frightening at once.

Although playing a role that could be mistaken as comic, John Hodgkinson brings out the pathos in the village idiot Tom Kettle.  Hodgkinson makes sure that we view Tom’s social awkwardness with pity and fashions Tom’s big scene with Caitlin in Act 2 into a moment with the same kind of mixture of comedy and sadness as in Chekhov.  He makes Tom’s recitals of Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Silent Lover” (1655) into an innocent encapsulation of the play’s action.  Des McAleer is wonderful as Uncle Pat, filled with learning but useless in providing any clues for practical action.  Yet, his knowledge of Virgil’s Aenied, Book 6, provides the play with its title when he explains that Charon, the ferryman in the underworld, says that he will take no one unburied and no liars across the the Styx to join the dead.     

The three main characters of the middle generation are all highly complex.  Paddy Considine as Quinn* and Laura Donnelly as Caitlin may pretend to themselves that their motives are innocent but they know that they are not.  Considine and Donnelly make clear that any pleasure Quinn and Caitlin feel is underlined by Quinn’s knowing he is betraying his living wife and Caitlin’s knowing she is betraying her missing husband.  Donnelly gives the impression that Caitlin has engaged herself so deeply with Quinn’s family as a way of escaping the unresolved loss of her husband.  Quinn, meanwhile, comes off as a weak-willed man through most of the action, but Considine suggests that Quinn has reserves of strength that, for unknown reasons, he refuses to employ.  When he does use them, the effect is sudden, shocking and devastating.

Genevieve O’Reilly as Mary Carney does not have as much stage time as Considine or Donnelly, but she uses what she has to make an indelible impression.  Mary’s outward feebleness and wanness, O’Reilly reveals as only a gauzy veil for the anger and malice that lurk within Mary.  With the quietest and calmest voice, O’Reilly’s Mary says things that turn Quinn’s world upside down.

The performances of the young actors cannot be ignored.  Tom Glynn-Carney makes Shane Corcoran a boastful, self-assured young punk not smart enough to know he has told too much about Muldoon, but smart enough to realize he is in danger.  Fra Fee plays Michael Carney, Jr., as a more confident, less compromised version of his father Quinn.  Fee has Michael argue rationally with Shane, not to embarrass him, but to help him understand what he has done and thus shows Michael to be morally the strongest of the Carney children.  Rob Malone’s Oisin sets off warning bells from his first appearance.  Malone gives Oisin strange, guarded behaviour right from the start that contrasts completely with the openness and carefreeness of all the other children.  Constantly lurking and overhearing private conversations, he has made himself into a spy in his own house as if he thinks he doesn’t belong there.         

Stuart Graham as Muldoon and Gerard Horan as Father Horrigan could not provide worse examples for the children of adults with power.  Graham’s Muldoon is steely and unyielding as much as Horan’s Horrigan is weak and fearful.

Butterworth’s play weaves a huge variety of human emotions with elements of history, literature and myth to create a portrait of the effects of the past on the present.  There is eternal regret and rage for the old, quick anger and deadly force for the adults and the possibility of insight or of danger for the young.  Some may not be pleased with Butterworth’s depiction of the devolution of some members of the IRA from idealists to domestic terrorists, but the exposition of that transformation has important lessons for the present that make The Ferryman essential viewing not just for its immaculate direction and performances but for the high relevance of its content.   

*From October 9, 2018, William Houston replaces Paddy Considine as Quinn.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Paddy Considine as Quinn Carney and Genevieve O’Reilly as Mary Carney; Laura Donnelly as Caitlin Carney (foreground) with Genevieve O’Reilly as Mary Carney and infant; Angel O’Callaghan as Nunu, Elise Alexandre as Mercy, Sophia Ally as Honor, Carla Langley as Shena, Fra Fee as Michael and Rob Malone (seated) as Oisin; Paddy Considine as Quinn, Angel O’Callaghan as Nunu, Elise Alexandre as Mercy and Rob Malone as Oisin  . ©2017 Johan Persson.

For tickets, visit www.delfontmackintosh.co.uk/tickets/the-ferryman.