Occasionally after a few glasses of Old Bridget Riley's Poteen I get confused about which Irish play is which. Who wrote The Beauty Queen of Inishmore? Was it the same feller who wrote Our Lady of the Weir? Or the Lieutenant of Christendom? Answers on a postcard, please, preferably with a picture of a small remote island composed entirely of peat bogs. Martin McDonagh (a Londoner) is to my mind the freshest Irish voice around because he turns all the cliches of the emerald isle inside out.
The characters in Conor McPherson's play The Seafarer at the National Theatre (Cottesloe) have every excuse for being confused -- their consumption of poteen, Irish whiskey and other fluids is heroic. But it's Christmas Eve and the reputation of Irish drama for creating drink-fuelled mayhem is at stake. Richard (Jim Norton) is a recently blinded old soak who remorselessly bullies his loser brother Sharky (Karl Johnson) into welcoming three equally dodgy visitors -- Ivan the despairing alcoholic (Conleth Hill), Nicky (Michael McElhatton) the Armani-jacketed smooth talker who has run off with Sharky's wife, and the mysterious well-dressed Mr Lockhart (Ron Cook). They drink, they talk, they play cards for money, drink a lot more over a 24-hour period and Sharky has a narrow escape.
The strength of McPherson's writing is his dizzying talent for character and dialogue; phrase after phrase comes spilling out. Richard recalls his days cleaning windows, looking in on 'myriad states of confusion and banjaxed relationships' and describes how he found God in the eyes of a bluebottle. Ivan collapses in anguish at the memory of his children witnessing his humiliation at the hands of his wife. Nicky boasts about the thousands of euros needed to buy an Armani leather jacket like his. But the core of the play lies in the relationship between Sharky and Mr Lockhart. Sharky has a dark secret in his past and Mr Lockhart is the cloven-hooved stranger who has come to remind him of it. 'I've come for your soul' says Mr Lockhart, and Sharky is poleaxed.
The problem isn't just that both Ron Cook and Karl Johnson occasionally struggle with the Dublin accent; Johnson's character Sharky never gets the chance to open up and tell his side of the story, so he remains an enigma. Mr Lockhart's speeches about life in hell don't really sound convincing and he's just not sinister enough to send a shiver down the spine. Ron Cook is a fine actor but I sensed that he didn't quite believe in the part he was playing. The idea of a Mephistophelian bargain coming back to haunt someone is pretty hackneyed and it has to be given some kind of original twist if it's going to succeed. At the end of the play the devil fails to get his due and departs empty-handed, leaving Sharky bathed in the sunlight of Christmas morning. Everyone will have a hell of a hangover, but otherwise it's an upbeat ending. I found this rather facile.
The real problem with McPherson's plays (I've seen The Weir and Shining City) is that he really doesn't have anything much to say. What's it about? What's it really about? So it's a ghost story, but where's the moral depth? There's a shallowness here of a young playwright who never quite seems to dig deep enough. Perhaps success has come too easily. Seeing Karl Johnson on stage reminded me of his role in Jez Butterworth's The Night Heron at the Royal Court three or four years ago. That was a flawed play with an unconvincing ending but it aimed high, and it gripped and fascinated me in a way that McPherson's plays don't.
Now pass me the poteen. Rather than going out for an Irish, I'm staying in to watch another episode of Father Ted.
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