The Weir review: enthralling mix of bar-room banter and absorbing storytelling
The Weir starring Brendan Gleeson. Picture: Rich Gilligan
★★★★☆
Almost 30 years since its West End debut, arrives back on a Dublin stage, only a few short years after a fine version directed by Caitriona McLaughlin at the Abbey.
So, was there a dire need for this latest production? Perhaps not.
But with writer Conor McPherson himself directing, and a cast as strong as this one, Landmark’s new outing, with Kate Horton Productions, was always going to be interesting.
The setting is as timeless as you’d expect in Rae Smith’s design: an unlovely 1970s relic of a pub interior, updated to the 1990s only by the crisp packets and beer taps. On a windy spring night, the Guinness is not flowing. So Jack, played by Brendan Gleeson in stately, commanding form, is reduced to drinking the “medicinal” bottles.
He’s soon joined by the publican Brendan (Owen McDonnell), and Jack’s mechanic co-worker Jim (a flawless Sean McGinley). They talk much of Finbar, the local made good. Soon he arrives in the shape of a wiry, high-kicking Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. He’s escorting Valerie (Kate Phillips), the “blow-in” he’s just sold a house to, around the area.
The trio’s banter about the bigshot might have one expecting McPherson to open a window on small-town rivalries. He does, to an extent, but his eye is more on the fantastic, as talk of a local “fairy road” brings each character to tell a supernaturally spooky story of their own. McPherson handles the mix of barroom banter and absorbing storytelling with all the nuance you'd expect from the writer of the piece. It's enthralling.
Show-don’t-tell is the old stricture, but in the telling, McPherson’s characters show us much about themselves. Finbar may be married, but the other three are studies in male loneliness. There are the small mercies of the pub, the bit of company, but their yearning, both said and unsaid, is palpable as the turf smoke that emerges from the grate.
It’s a very male space. But not oppressively so. Valerie, despite having her wine served in a beer glass, is genuinely welcomed and an equal, even if she has a lot of listening to do. Yet her story, when we finally get to it, is the most wrenching of all, stemming from the worst kind of tragedy.
Here, the supernatural meets the deeply personal. As we realise we are all haunted, Gleeson’s Jack delivers one more story. His own one, of regrets, lost love, and “what might have been”.
We’ve all been there. And thus, we are absorbed by empathy into this world of stories and their telling.
