Sometimes unevenness in an author’s collected volume can be a sign of great accomplishment. Take the third volume of the Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s collected works. Two of the plays, The Birds and The Dance of Death, feel less central to the McPherson canon because they are adaptations or translations (of Daphne Du Maurier’s short story and August Strindberg’s play, respectively). McPherson says in the foreword to The Birds, “I like it because it really feels like someone else wrote it.” A third play, The Veil, is a work that seems very much “against type” for the Irish playwright, known for his small casts of mainly male characters in contemporary settings, and often in the mode of extended monologue. Conversely, The Veil is set in an Irish manor house in 1822, as social instabilities erupt. It is a period piece with a large ensemble and prominent female roles. In the foreword to Plays: Three, McPherson admits that it was met with a “certain incomprehension” when it premiered at the National Theater in 2011.
With a séance scene, a “Big-House Gothic” setting, and a general atmosphere of the occult, The Veil does fulfill one central expectation for a new work by McPherson—a fresh, often startling handling of a supernatural presence or visitation. The ghosts or spirits that often haunt this writer’s plays become at one level little parables for the powers of theater, where a willingly believing audience encounters a conjuration of sorts, imaginative and yet embodied by actors, a dream in a little room. The supernatural, for McPherson, should also remind us of a human being’s place in this world—we are, he says in one interview, “animals who can talk, and think because of that they know everything.” McPherson attempts to present on stage “the magic of being alive, the magic of being conscious, the mystery and the miracle of that, the complete unknown aspect of all of that which is so necessary to live our lives.”
Three plays—two adaptations and a puzzler. So far, so average, a suspicious reader might say. I would promptly invite such a reader to consider the first two plays collected here, Shining City (2004) and The Seafarer (2006). Then tell me what you think. Here’s what I think: as a regular playgoer, I will simply say that performances I have been fortunate to see of The Seafarer (in a celebrated production by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater) and Shining City (in a surprisingly powerful staging by a local Chicago theater company) are two of the most pleasing, thrilling experiences I’ve had in any theater in the past decade. Both plays enjoyed strong openings in London before transferring to New York for successful Broadway stints. Both received Tony nominations for best play that year, and the actor Jim Norton (a McPherson regular) won a Tony Award for playing the blind old man Richard in The Seafarer. Both plays also received high praise from the New York Times’ Ben Brantley and other prominent drama critics. Late last year, Terry Teachout in The Wall Street Journal identified The Seafarer as the “best new play I’ve seen in the past decade.”
If this were not impressive enough, McPherson often directs his own plays as well, saying his work benefits from the give-and-take between director and actors. McPherson seems to be an actor’s playwright—one sensitive to both the struggles and the promises and possibilities of those who bring his characters to life onstage. Similarly, interviews suggest that McPherson is unusually open-handed and flexible when it comes to the ongoing evolution of his script during rehearsals.
Plays: Three, then, presents a precocious playwright (McPherson is not yet 43) who has roughly a dozen important plays behind him and, in this collection, two plays that display a writer in his prime: Shining City and The Seafarer can look forward to many future stagings and revivals, and it is hard to imagine these plays not coming to mind fairly immediately whenever McPherson and his peculiar powers as an artist will be discussed. If they ensure that the collection as a whole feels like a rattlebag of sorts, then fine—most of us would kill for such unevenness.
If Shining City and The Seafarer characterize this third collection of plays, his first two collected volumes can be differently summed up. Reread today, Plays: One now looks like an “apprentice” collection, featuring a handful of early plays pointing toward better things. The volume concludes with St. Nicholas (1997), a two-act monologue spoken by a self-hating theater critic (!), rancid from alcoholism and wracked by love, who encounters and eventually comes to serve a company of London vampires. Plays such as Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief reflect the lacerating language and underworld settings of David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino, two early influences, and overall they reflect the “lad culture” prominent in British drama of the 1990s. A final play, This Lime Tree Bower, was expanded and adapted into the film Saltwater, one of a handful McPherson has made as both writer and director.
In the subsequent collection, Plays: Two, we find McPherson rising to full confidence in his early phase. The hallmark play here is The Weir, whose huge success in London’s West End in 1997 conferred upon him an international reputation. The play begins with a series of awkward interactions between characters in a far western Irish pub, but soon they are telling one another increasingly potent, emotionally dizzying ghost stories.
This second collected edition boasted two other formidable plays. The first is Port Authority (2001), again featuring male characters, three speakers each of a different generation, and again in unapologetic monologue mode. (The stage direction basically says the men are speaking in a darkened theater.) No other McPherson play feels as saturated in regret and missed connections as Port Authority—at least until one reads the adjacent play, Dublin Carol (2000). Haunted by its Christmas Eve setting, which McPherson would soon use in The Seafarer to brighter effect, Dublin Carol demonstrates the lonely terrors of the alcoholic: how such a compulsion inevitably destroys everything, including every relationship the addict holds most dear, and the “sickening disgust” that results. This play also displays McPherson’s characteristic blending of careful attention to realism with supernatural or theatrically estranging elements. For example, one stage direction sets a scene with great specificity—”office on the Northside of Dublin, around Fairview or the North Strand Road”—and yet works its Christmas setting and its symbolically named characters (Noel, Carol) toward what Ian Walsh calls a secular version of Everyman and other medieval allegorical plays. Overall, Karen Fricker’s description of the characters’ monologic performances in Port Authority applies just as well to John in Dublin Carol: “stories of men trapped by their own self awareness, too weak to be good in their lives but smart enough to know how bad they are.”
Walsh’s and Fricker’s essays are among the many readable and informative critical studies in the first such collection devoted to the playwright and his works, The Theater of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond.’ Those wishing to know more about McPherson will find here two essays treating St. Nicholas, no fewer than four showing exclusive or partial attention to The Seafarer, at least one or two essays apiece on The Weir, Dublin Carol, Port Authority, Shining City, The Veil (co-editor Eamonn Jordan’s essay on The Veil was particularly illuminating, helping me to appreciate better the contemporary national dimension to this perplexing recent play), and The Birds, and also a handful of essays devoted to his films, including his production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame. In early interviews, McPherson often expressed indebtedness to Beckett, both dramatically and philosophically. In the current collection’s interview, however, which concludes the volume, the interviewer states, as if it were a piece of conventional wisdom, that McPherson’s later plays evince a “deeper metaphysical engagement.”
This essay collection will be an essential book for anyone interested in McPherson, to be set alongside Gerald Wood’s monograph Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief and an excellent interview with the playwright in Jody Allen Randolph’s Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland. Though he is still relatively young, McPherson is old enough to have a sense of his own growth as a person and a writer. “Youth is great place to be, where you have no fear of the consequences of your life,” he says in the collection’s interview. “I had no insight into myself or the world.” Sober and a new father now, he finds himself in a world quite different from that of his early writing days in Dublin and London. Those with knowledge of McPherson’s personal life may be inclined to mark a further division in his career, roughly dividing it in half: the plays fueled by drink and those that emerged from sobriety.
Alcohol had long been central in McPherson’s plays. One early introduction concludes, “See yas at the bar!” and he attributed some of his early success as a writer to “doomy gloomy hangover energy.” The blackout-drinker’s tale in Dublin Carol proved to be a dark personal prophecy. On the night of the London premiere of his next play, Port Authority, in 2001, McPherson collapsed and faced a ten-week hospitalization for pancreatitis, so thoroughly had drink wrecked his body. The plays that would follow, and that are now collected in Plays: Three, were experiments of sorts. McPherson said he was not at all sure he would be able to write effectively without alcohol’s inspiration. In a related remark in the foreword of this present book, McPherson says that good writing requires a recklessness, whereas self-consciousness is the “enemy of art.” On the other hand, he seems always to have had a rather humble view of how he, and we, manage to get through our lives. “I was one of those guys who stumbled around in the dark for a long time,” he said of his drunken past in a 2008 Chicago Tribune interview. “Not that I’m stumbling around in the light now.” Likewise, the Tribune theater critic Chris Jones has nicely summarized McPherson’s characters in Port Authority as “familiar with the difficulty of holding it together.”
The Weir‘s ghost stories put McPherson on a path toward a more direct, sustained engagement with the supernatural in his plays. In Shining City, a fiftysomething businessman, John, visits a therapist following the death of his estranged wife in a car accident. We soon learn that John feels unhinged because he is convinced that his wife’s ghost remains present in their home. As he works painfully toward a self-reckoning, it becomes clear that the counselor, Ian, an expriest, is also concealing his own histories and mysteries. The second meeting between the men is a gorgeously written scene, with John’s resistance to the session itself and his struggle to narrate—to come to terms with, to find terms for—his marital failings and his resilient guilt. Here is an early exchange between client and counselor:
JOHN:
Pause.
You know, when you’re young. And you’re told about … what to expect I suppose. It is kind of happy ever after. But it’s … you know, it’s weird to accept what happiness really is, you know, or what it is … nothing is ever like anyone expects, is it, you know? Like, it’s not a fairy tale … I mean, it has to be just kind of ordinary, you know? A bit boring even, otherwise it’s probably not real, you know?
IAN: … Yeah … ?
JOHN: No, it’s, it’s just that … we probably had it, you know? I mean when I think of it, really, we … we had it all, you know? But it’s, it’s hard to … accept … that this is it. You … you go … searching, not searching, I wasn’t going anywhere searching for anything, but, I think I was always slightly … waiting … you know?
This tentative recounting soon rises to a pitch that is searing, a word I regularly find myself using when describing McPherson’s dramatic powers to others. Eventually John describes to Ian how, as his marriage was disintegrating, he rounded on his wife: “And I … grabbed her by the shoulders and I shook her. I shook her so hard. I could feel how small and helpless she was. It was a terrible feeling.” Don’t you dare speak to me, he erupts.
And she just cowered down on the floor—nothing like this had ever happened between us before, you know? And she curled herself up into a little ball there down beside the bin. And the sobs just came out of her, you know? Just the total … bewilderment, you know?
Yet even amid such hard-to-watch scenes of disclosure, admission, and regret, there is often the prospect of better understanding or even healing hovering just above. Pondering his wife’s ghost at the end of this scene, John asks out loud if she is trying to hurt him, but then wonders if he has it all wrong. “Maybe she’s … maybe she’s just trying to save me, you know?”
In The Seafarer, there is a similar struggling search for healing, for finding a way to be at peace with oneself amid a pile-up of failings. The title alludes to the well-known Anglo-Saxon poem of exile: “Oppressed by cold my feet were bound by frost / In icy bonds, while worries simmered hot / About my heart, and hunger from within / Tore the sea-weary spirit.” The characters here are wanderers, too, haunted by mistakes and running from responsibilities. At one point, Richard says that his younger brother Sharky has a “recklessness in his heart that is the undoing and ruination of his whole life.” That flare of paired words, “undoing and ruination,” like something from a 17th-century treatise, illustrates well McPherson’s frequent poetic flourishes. Generally, though, the language is crisply boisterous and coarse, befitting a group of men on the fringe who speak so bluntly to their friends that they sound like enemies.
The story takes place in Baldoyle, outside Dublin, in Sharky’s and Richard’s dumpy basement apartment that is, as the stage directions explicitly tell us, “a kind of bar in its appearance,” complete with pub artifacts and passed out or hungover hosts and visitors. The brothers are joined by Ivan, a bumbling friend trying to escape his marital troubles, and Nicky, an abrasive friend who has awkwardly taken up with Sharky’s ex-wife. Sharky, the play’s protagonist, becomes infuriated, to comic effect, when he sees Nicky driving his old car around the neighborhood. Throughout the first act, the Christmastime festivities seem to be a last-gasp stay against each character’s situational desperation. And this intensifies toward the end of the act when Nicky arrives at the brothers’ poker game accompanied by a well-dressed new friend, the wonderfully named Mr. Lockhart, who turns out to be the Devil.
For this diabolical card game, played with Sharky’s soul in the balance, McPherson drew upon legends of the Hellfire Club, 18th-century aristocrats who would meet to gamble in a ruined estate in Wicklow Mountains. Stories also circulated about “The Devil at Binn Eadair,” featuring a card game during which one player drops a card and, upon bending down to retrieve it, notices that another of the players has cloven hooves. The Devil then disappears with a thunderclap. McPherson has said that he was always disappointed to find the story ending just when it was getting interesting, and so he extends the narrative in The Seafarer‘s second act. Lockhart heightens the dramatic stakes by telling Sharky, and the audience, who he is and why he has come. “You think you’re better than me? Pig. Well, think again. Because we’re gonna play for your soul and I’m gonna win and you’re coming through the old hole in the wall with me tonight.” Sharky’s Faustian sense of pending doom electrifies the poker game and the drunken conversations that follow.
We soon learn that the Devil, this fallen angel, is merely inhabiting a human form: “I hate these stupid insect bodies you have,” he says. Lockhart is a tragically compelling character in his own right. McPherson gives him some of the strongest language in the play, including lengthy descriptions of hell and heaven that feel in performance like little arias. He introduces the isolating maritime language of the “Seafarer” poem to get across hell’s unimaginable alienation. Heaven, a place now lost to him, is described gorgeously as a place of stunning concord:
At a certain point each day, music plays. It seems to emanate from the very sun itself. Not so much a tune as a heartbreakingly beautiful vibration in the sunlight shining on and through all the souls. It’s so moving you wonder how you could ever have doubted anything.
Without giving too much away, I can say that the play achieves a winning ending. Christopher Murray, in his essay in The Theatre of Conor McPherson, describes it well: “good fellowship or ordinary humanity is more powerful in its frailty than the terrible representative of the forces of evil.” Lockhart is outwitted by the weak. The men are not quite fools for Christ, but fools who come to enjoy, at the last minute, a most improbable triumph. They appear to receive, all the more powerfully for their not even knowing it, the benefactions promised by the gospel. Relaying this message becomes of one Lockhart’s last actions: “Somebody up there likes you, Sharky. You’ve got it all.” This powerful moment reminds me of the disguised Edgar’s comment to his blinded father, Gloucester, in King Lear: “Thy life’s a miracle.” Or, as the sharp-tongued Richard tells his brother, “You’re alive, aren’t you?”
When Richard says this, a small red lamp beneath an oleograph of the Sacred Heart of Jesus flickers. It is a common Irish icon of generations past, and a delightfully quaint, unsubtle symbol throughout the play. Its presence may have something to do with the fact that McPherson always lit a candle when he was writing this play, which is the only time he has done that. The tapping of this lamp pays homage to a similar scene in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, and The Seafarer has other sources as well. It most obviously invites comparisons with Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, with Lockhart paralleling the character Hickey. McPherson has also said that the film The Exorcist made a huge impression on him when he was young. That storyline of a “dark visitor” appearing is a popular one, appearing onstage now in American playwright John Patrick Shanley’s new play set in Ireland, Outside Mullingar.
These days have all of the makings of another McPherson Moment. Last year ended with two different McPherson plays running in Chicago. Although the show closed in early January, the small Seanachai Theatre Company put on The Seafarer. One specific directorial choice was noteworthy: in past productions, Lockhart stood in prosperous contrast to the other men, arriving in Richard and Sharky’s basement flat dressed smartly in a camel-hair overcoat. Wearing a suit and with hair slicked back, he might be called the Wolf of Grafton Street. In the latest Chicago production, however, Lockhart appeared to be as struggling and marginalized as the men he challenged to cards. The choice supported the Devil’s impatient, slightly desperate demeanor, and added a poignancy (think likewise of Milton’s Satan) to his great speeches of diabolical loneliness.
(An acquaintance who teaches at University College Dublin, McPherson’s alma mater, reported to me that in the original Dublin production of The Seafarer, Lockhart spoke with a prominently northern English accent. Was this a postcolonial wink from an Irish playwright? She explained that it was more complicated; whereas the Irish connection to the United States is often discussed, there is also a strong emigration history between Ireland and northern England. “You should see all of the Leeds football jerseys in Ireland!” she said.)
Meanwhile, the Writers Theatre on the North Shore has been staging a production of Port Authority, which has garnered national attention; reviews have been invariably strong.
Finally and most prominently, McPherson’s latest work, The Night Alive, which he wrote and is directing, is playing on Broadway following a London run earlier in the year at the Donmar Warehouse, a part of that company’s season-long attention to McPherson. (Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater will stage a production this fall.)Because of McPherson’s stature, the script of The Night Alive was published in the UK practically simultaneously with the play’s London premier. TCG’s American edition is scheduled for publication in May. After the divergences of The Veil, McPherson in many ways returns to pure form in The Night Alive. The play focuses on Tommy, a fiftysomething slob living in failure-to-launch squalor in a room in his Uncle Maurice’s home. One night he encounters a twentysomething prostitute, Aimee. She is bloodied, and Tommy awkwardly brings her back to his place to give her aid, as best as he can. The cast is filled out by Doc, Tommy’s odd friend.
And finally there is Kenneth, Aimee’s boyfriend or pimp, who shows up at Tommy’s, too. (One critic has said that a brief but shocking scene involving Kenneth may be the most terrifying moment he has ever seen on a stage.)
Ciarán Hinds plays the lead role, and does so splendidly, with his out-of-shape bearing and rubbery face. (For a small taste of his and McPherson’s magic together, check out a short clip of Hinds in character.1) Hinds also played Mr. Lockhart in The Seafarer‘s Broadway production, and is the star in McPherson’s most recognizable, accessible feature film to date, The Eclipse (2009, available on Netflix), which features a heady brew of deceased spouses, troubled romances, supernatural hauntings, and shocking visual moments. The film adds supernatural elements to a more realist short story by Billy Roche, McPherson’s co-writer. (McPherson also directed.)
The Night Alive once again features McPherson’s gritty language at its best. These are characters who virtually breathe expletives but sometimes seem frustrated by their own limitations of expression or compassion. Yet there are moments of great peace and tenderness in this play, too. And once again, we have a Christmas setting. At one point Doc says, “Will I tell you the good thing about Christmas? No one can turn you away. You see that light in the window. You go on in.” Toward the play’s end Doc reports a dream he has had, about an “old chap,” whom he identifies matter-of-factly as one of the three wise men, and who proceeds to give Doc a surprising lesson on black holes, timelessness, and the existence of God. Another moment from Doc’s dream recalls Lockhart’s description of heaven in The Seafarer:
DOC: Yeah, apparently, when you die, you won’t even know you’re dead! It’ll just feel like everything has suddenly … come right, in your life. Like everything has just clicked into place and off you go.
TOMMY: Oh well, that’s good, isn’t it?
DOC: Yeah!
The rather audacious ending of The Night Alive (which I won’t disclose) has divided audiences. The theater critic of The Guardian, Michael Billington, wrote that he would have given the play four stars rather than three if it had ended with the penultimate scene. McPherson, for his part, seems perfectly steady in the defense of the bolder conclusion, saying in an interview that he ended it that way “because that’s the lovely possibility of theater.”
For me, an even more memorable scene occurs at the play’s midpoint, when Tommy, Aimee, and Doc go in for some impromptu dancing, sweetly if clumsily. Soon Uncle Maurice is thumping on the ceiling from upstairs. The moment called to mind the dancing that ends Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, where the movements become grace notes for human connection and the order of the universe and history’s strange linkages, something more than coincidence. There is no such uplift here, but the scene is nevertheless moving. The trio is dancing to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” Tommy’s comment makes him sound like a down-and-out Hamlet. His words represent well McPherson’s earthy characterizations, and his abiding interest in the big questions of our existence, our trials and comforts, and the meanings of those things:
TOMMY: Old bollocks would give you a pain in your arse. (Raises his mug to his poster of Marvin Gaye.) Marvin, you said it there, man. What’s goin’ on? That is the question. What in the name of Jaysus is goin’ on? The man who answers that one will … (Raises his mug to whoever will answer that question.)
Brett Foster is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. His first book of poetry, The Garbage Eater, was published in 2011 by Northwestern University Press. A second collection, Fall Run Road, was awarded Finishing Line Press’s 2011 Open Chapbook Prize, and appeared in 2012. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Anglican Theological Review, The New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, and Yale Review.
Books discussed in this essay:
Plays: Three, by Conor McPherson (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013). The Theatre of Conor McPherson: ‘Right Beside the Beyond’, edited by Lilian Chambers and Eamonn Jordan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012). The Night Alive, by Conor McPherson (London: Nick Hern Books, 2013/TCG, 2014).
Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
