{"id":1315,"date":"2017-05-12T18:06:38","date_gmt":"2017-05-12T18:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1315"},"modified":"2017-05-12T18:06:39","modified_gmt":"2017-05-12T18:06:39","slug":"who-pays-the-ferryman-its-complicated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2017\/05\/who-pays-the-ferryman-its-complicated.html","title":{"rendered":"Who pays The Ferryman? It’s complicated."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Paddy Considine and Laura Donnelly. Photo: Johan Persson<\/p><\/div>\n

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The hottest new play in London has got the maximum 5-star rating from half a dozen of the national newspapers; its West End transfer was assured before it even opened. There hasn\u2019t been a theatrical event like this since \u2013 well, since the same playwright\u2019s Jerusalem<\/em>, Jez Butterworth\u2019s \u201cstate of the nation\u201d play about England. The Ferryman<\/em> details the state of another part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland. Set on a fifty-acre farm in Armagh, in late August, 1981, at the time when Bobby Sands had just conferred martyrdom upon himself by self-starvation, The Ferryman is so convincingly Irish, in thought, in expression, even in the movement and postures of the cast, that you\u2019d think they all, plus Butterworth and his director, Sam Mendes, must themselves be<\/em> Irish.<\/p>\n

Just as in Jerusalem, where Mark Rylance\u2019s performance got somewhere close to the heart of what it means to be English, in The Ferryman the entire troupe conveys both the charm and the dangers of Irish history and culture. Reading the text, I was often struck by the difficult idiom \u2013 it\u2019s not just the vowels and the extra syllables in words such as \u201cfilm\u201d (\u201cfill\u2019-em\u201d) that make the dialogue Irish, or having a y<\/em> sound after the initial consonant in \u201ccar\u201d and \u201cgarden\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s also vocabulary differences. Children are \u201cthe weans,\u201d doing or saying something negative or hostile is \u201cpissing on the strawberries.\u201d The rhythms are different; a sentence often ends with a vocative: \u201cDance with your sister-in-law, man.\u201d And six-year-olds swear like soldiers in a brothel.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not expert enough to say whether Butterworth has got everything right, or if he\u2019s captured all the differences between the speech of Ulster and that of the south; but it is an extraordinary feat of script-writing for a non-native speaker. And to me and my non-Irish companion, if occasional passages seemed only barely comprehensible, as though no concessions were being made to those who did not speak or understand the Irish dialect \u2013 this is only to say that it felt and sounded <\/em>authentic to us, even at the expense of our missing the odd punch-line. (Kudos to the dialect coach, Majella Hurley, though a good many of the cast actually are Irish.)<\/p>\n

As in Jerusalem, Butterworth finds humour in the horror, and makes the audience wonder nervously whether they\u2019re seeing a comedy or a tragedy. In the prologue, we see black-jacketed IRA thugs blackmailing a priest into betraying the sacrament of the confessional. Twenty-year-old Seamus Carney \u201cvanished\u201d ten years earlier. Now his body has been found, preserved by the peat bog in which it was dumped, as was \u201chis picture of his wee\u2019un. And his Timex watch.\u201d Looking at a photograph of the corpse, Father Horrigan \u201ccan also see the bullet hole in the back of his head,\u201d showing that he was \u201cexecuted\u201d by the IRA, four weeks after his brother, the philoprogenitive Quinn Carney (a glorious piece of acting by Paddy Considine), left the proscribed organisation. The high-ranking IRA officer, Muldoon (Stuart Graham), menaces Father Horrigan (Gerard Horan): \u201cI know you knew Quinn. Sure, you and him shared the cage there in Long Kesh.\u201d This frightening scene ends with a blackout, and the joyously incongruous stage direction: \u201c\u2018Street Fighting Man\u2019 by the Rolling Stones, loud.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>The stagecraft when the scene changes to Act One is magnificent. We are now in an old farmhouse kitchen, with the permanently open lids of what is supposed to be a coal-fired range (but looks very like my own ancient Aga), laundry drying everywhere, and a dozen lit candles (bravo, set designer Rob Howell). The Stones are now playing on the \u201cbig ghetto blaster,\u201d and the stunning Caitlin Carney (Laura Donnelly, superb), Quinn\u2019s sister-in-law, and he are playing a game of Connect Four. They\u2019re high on drink or the contents of their roll-ups, and continue their game, while also playing who-will-you-save-in-the-lifeboat? They end up dancing, blindfolded, and Butterworth\u2019s stage direction is as funny as the dialogue: \u201cQUINN Jaggers along as the music builds.<\/em>\u201d They\u2019re obviously lovers.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s either very late at night or very early in the morning of the day when their three teen-aged Corcoran cousins from Derry will join the elder Carney boys in bringing in the harvest, and celebrating with a feast and ceilidh<\/em>. Soon the Carney \u201ckeeds\u201d pour onto the stage, 16-year-old JJ and 15-year-old Michael, plus Caitlin\u2019s only son, Oisin, 14; and the girls, Shena (14), Nunu (Nuala, 11), Mercy (9), Honor (7); and there is also the 9-month-old baby, sinisterly christened \u201cBobby\u201d Carney. The adults are Mary, Carney\u2019s wife, usually confined to her bed with \u201cthe viruses\u201d, and Quinn\u2019s savagely pro-Republican Aunt Patricia (in her 80s, played fiercely by Dearbhla Molloy) and Uncle Patrick (70s, Des McAleer). Then there\u2019s his other aunt, Maggie Far Away (Br\u00edd Brennan), in her 80s, usually as demented as her name indicates, but capable of astonishing feats of historical recall and also banshee-spotting, delivered in long, delicious monologues. There is a single Englishman in the play, Tom Kettle (John Hodgkinson), in his dishevelled 40s. He\u2019s cast-listed as \u201can English <\/em>factotum,\u201d and you\u2019d suppose he\u2019d be a stereotype; but he\u2019s actually a complicated Shakespearean fool, able to plough a straight furrow, mend a window, catalogue rainbows, grow apples from seed and produce a live rabbit and goose from his voluminous pockets. He can also recite a poem by Walter Raleigh and has a crush on Caitlin. One of the Corcoran brothers, Shane, is played by a relative newcomer, Tom Glynn-Carney, who gives a memorable performance as a snake-hipped, randy, way too self-confident 17-year-old. But then, all the performances are superlative; Sam Mendes gets the 21-strong ensemble to give of their best, as he also seems to do of the real-live baby (the second this London season, preceded by Nina Raine\u2019s in her own Consent<\/em>), and the goose and rabbits are uncannily well-behaved.<\/p>\n

Into this Irish Eden intrudes the (explicitly) snake-like Muldoon, prepared to coerce anyone he cannot seduce. He thinks the IRA is about to achieve popularity because of the self-sacrificial deaths of the hunger strikers, and that they will acquire the status of political prisoners, despite Margaret Thatcher\u2019s mantra that \u201cThere can be no question of political status for someone who is serving a sentence for crime. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political, it is crime.\u201d Muldoon\u2019s purpose is, at any cost, to keep the Carneys and Corcorans silent about the cause and manner of Seamus Carney\u2019s death. At the centre of the play is, of course, the unburied, peat-pickled body of Seamus, and the question, who is the ferryman, the Chiron who will row him across the Styx to eternal rest?<\/p>\n

Butterworth sees (and sees through) Muldoon\u2019s attempt to appropriate Irish history \u2013 and, what is more important, Irish mythology \u2013 to the IRA\u2019s political ends. Yet, artist that he is, Butterworth appreciates the magic and the myths, and the history, the charm, and the craic<\/em>. Like Jerusalem, The Ferryman shows that this non-urban idyll turns out to be a rural dystopia or, perhaps more correctly, a countryside kakatopia. But there are no abstractions in this more than three hour-long play; it is lovingly particular and each concrete detail seems to be cherished by playwright, director and every one of its many fine actors. Following its sold-out run at the Royal Court, The Ferryman transfers on 20 June to the Gielgud Theatre, London, where I hope to see it again.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  The hottest new play in London has got the maximum 5-star rating from half a dozen of the national newspapers; its West End transfer was assured before it even opened. There hasn\u2019t been a theatrical event like this since \u2013 well, since the same playwright\u2019s Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth\u2019s \u201cstate of the nation\u201d play about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-ld","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1315"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1318,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1315\/revisions\/1318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}