The Ferryman

by Jez Butterworth

seen at the Gielgud Theatre on 30 September 2017

Sam Mendes directs Butterworth's new play set in rural Northern Ireland in September 1981, as news of the death of an IRA hunger striker reaches a farming family busy with the harvest and hoping that their involvement in the Troubles is more or less behind them. Paddy Considine as Quinn Carney and Laura Donnelly as his sister-in-law Caitlin lead a superb cast of over twenty actors in this stunning evocation of a family beset with memories, tragedies and evasions, with both chaotic and affectionate interactions between generations, with deep engagement in the business of farming, and with a fateful vulnerability after all to the political situation around them.

Rob Howell has designed a marvellous set, the living area of the Carney farmhouse though which the life of the family ebbs and flows in a dizzying but completely self-assured manner. (Sam Mendes comments in the program how essential it was to have no doors, even though there are four ways into the room, so as to make the action dramatically seamless.) We see the early start of the harvest day, with the children squabbling over trivial issues that are of vital importance to them, the typical hurly-burly of a household with seven children, a baby, a sick mother and a prominent aunt, and also older great-aunts and a great-uncle; and an indulged strange Englishman taken in as a child and now a slow-speaking slow-thinking adult who can both disarm and unsettle the people he lives with.

But before all this starts there is a sobering encounter in town between the Carneys' parish priest and IRA operatives who are eager to control the fallout from the discovery of the body of Quinn's brother (Caitlin's husband), shot some years before for reasons they don't want made clear. So all through the bustle of Carney family life we are on the lookout for tensions and anomalies, and aware that the past is about to erupt into their lives whether Quinn wants it or not; it adds an edge to the proceedings and makes the later developments of the play entirely consistent with the 'ordinariness' (now no doubt fast vanishing as three generations more rarely live together) of family life so liberally displayed for us.

Memories and stories go back to the Easter Rising of 1916 and earlier; but the story of the two brothers is also important, and the palpable but unspoken love between Quinn and Caitlin complicating the generous hospitality he and his wife Mary offered her and her infant son when they first took them in. The young children love it when their increasingly demented great-aunt is sufficiently 'present' to tell them stories from her past; the teenage boys are more interested in bravado, exploring alcohol, and circling around the alluring figure Muldoon, the creepily efficient IRA operative whose menace only the adults can even guess at.

What could have been a mish-mash of Irish stereotypes and cliches is on the contrary a funny, moving and convincing revelation, a complex, probing and deeply satisfying play beautifully produced and acted.