Review The Ferryman

The Ferryman
by Jez Butterworth

Cooking The Family Goose
https://royalcourttheatre.com

Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), a former IRA man, has turned his sword into a plowshare and now, in 1981, is cultivating cereal crops on the family farm.
 
Jez Butterworth's dramatic tapestry weaves in the past - back to the prehistoric bog men whose fate disturbingly echoes more recent events through the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the men and women who disappeared during The Troubles - up to the play's present day with the hunger strikers in Long Kesh's Maze Prison 

Artfully staged and acted, the large cast of this sprawling family melodrama is skilfully deployed by director Sam Mendes over nearly three and a half hours.  

The play is structured like a movie  or a boxed set  setting up a question mark and the imminence of threat and violence in the first scene and switching to the Armagh countryside with several stories intertwined.

A distinctive literary sensibility runs through the drama - the plays of Brian Friel, Sean O'Casey and Eugene O'Neill came to mind while there's more of a whiff of James Joyce with its tales of lost loves and dashed hopes with political activity.  It's often humorous, troubling, delightful and menacing in turns.  

There's meticulous attention to detail by designer Rob Howell down to the kitchen of the Catholic farmer's family with the smell of cooking meat wafting from the substantial range. 

As the family descends for the start of the harvest, there's also something of a feel of Northern Irish harder-edged, more sweary version of  The Waltons  where we meet parents, children, elderly uncles and aunts and eventually cousins. 

But the play starts very differently in a city the very name of which is a matter of contention with a horrifying exhumation of the recent past, showing this can be no rural idyll.  

The family arrangements of Quinn, his widowed sister-in-law luminous dark haired Caitlin (Laura Donnelly), joined eventually by his fragile, exhausted fair-haired wife Mary (Genevieve O'Reilly) and the pall of  possible illicit relationships and abuses, past and present, also hang over the generations. 

Yet in some ways this felt like a mystery story which never quite materialized, almost as if we were being deliberately diverted (in every sense of the word), with the possible chief character of that tale, Father Horrigan (Gerard Horan) hardly appearing. 

And that's what we found mildly frustrating Stories are evoked and then curtailed - so we never quite know what happens in the end even if it does feel jam-packed. The strands of the stories come thick and fast with the hovering of stereotypes. 

Yet it enchants enough that we bob along on the sea of words and comings and goings including a remarkably docile baby and various live animals, courtesy of gentle giant Englishman Tom Kettle (John Hodgkinson), with a Shakespearean sounding moniker which happens to be the name of a Home Rule politician and friend of James Joyce. 

Considine as Quinn makes a fine professional stage debut, a tall, slightly stooping but sturdy figure who like, Donelly's Caitlin, is caught between ancient and the modern, 

But this is very much an ensemble piece from youngest child Honor (Grace Doherty alternating with Sophia Ally) to aged wheelchair-bound Aunt Maggie Far Away (Brid Brennan). Like a victim of sleeping sickness awoken by drugs, she has moments of lucidity turning her into an aged Scherherazade.   

Des McAleer as Uncle Pat straddles the century through his education in the classics, as well of his memories of a harsh but pastoral farming past. An education which smacked to us as possibly British based. Equally, Dearhbla Molloy crosses the years both visually and verbally as the staunchly republican Aunt Patricia.
  
The play's visceral strength lies in its archeological layers of Irish history where everything. good and bad,  feels "pickled", perpetually in readiness for Virgil's boatman of death, The Ferryman of the title. 

Amidst the lyrical flow there are also sly hints of something more - a glimpse of another son of Armagh, the Reverend Ian Paisley and also international economic reality underpinning the farm.  

Through myth, literature and filmmaking, the image of Northern Ireland and Ireland has itself been "pickled", even if the hornblowing for the harvest crosses more than one culture. 

Now on the verge of Brexit, we look back from yet another archeological layer as the borderlands enter into a new phase and it's a green light for a play which feels obliquely apt for our times.

Review The Children

The Children
by Lucy Kirkwood

Even Little Boy Gets Old
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

 In 1945 the nuclear bomb which devastated Hiroshima was famously called Little Boy. Whatever the morality or justification for its use, it initiated the start of the nuclear age, the source of seemingly limitless electricity. And then it came back to bite us with disquiet over the building of reactors in the Middle East, part of the road to war.

The retired nuclear scientists in Lucy Kirkwood's new one-act, nearly two-hour play, The Children, directed by James McDonald, have more immediate concerns. Robin (Ron Cook), who now farms, is a little boy grown old who is apparently intent on saving his cows.

He and his wife, earth mother Hazel (Deborah Findlay), who met in the lab, now rent, amidst power cuts and cliff erosion, a coastal cottage. Why? They've been forced to leave their farm - and the cows with their soulful brown eyes - after an earthquake and tidal wave causes a Fukushima-type nuclear disaster irradiating the surrounding area.

Ron returns every now and then, at some risk, to the farm in the exclusion zone, he says, to tend the cows while mother of four Hazel has settled down to her life, listening on a wind up radio to Radio 4, continuing with her yoga, fielding telephone calls from their seemingly needy 30-something eldest daughter and dealing efficiently with the lack of power.

Even this strange existence can become routine in the golden glow of a basic but comfortable country kitchen in which we meet first Hazel and an unexpected visitor, glamorous childless Rose (Francesca Annis). Rose has returned from the United States and is looking up her former colleagues.  Only blood is trickling down her top.

It turns out when she came up behind Hazel, the latter inadvertently bashed her on the nose. An accident but it sets up a tense dynamic between the two women who, it emerges, have a past rivalry.

We enjoyed the sparky dialogue which provided plenty of laughs from the start of the play with a witty and touching performance from Deborah Findlay as the wife who finds her routine and peace of mind shattered by the arrival of Rose.

There were times it felt overly long, as if there were an agreement to go from A to B to C etc, one point to another and some of the bits in between felt a little like padding. The relationship with almost middle-aged daughter Lauren, whose character and conversations are reported rather than verified by the audience, finally seems introduced, only to be short-circuited. 

Still, there was definitely enough in it to make us wonder whether Rose, even after supposedly revealing her reasons for surprising her erstwhile colleagues was far more deceitful and  had different plans. And to have question marks over her exact current relationship with Robin - neatly played by Ron Cook.

We only have Rose's word that her health problems needed surgery and were not the cosmetic vanity and fear of an ageing single woman. Indeed, for a play which does indeed have two juicy parts for women, the gender politics  could be interpreted as retro as the country kitchen - a male bull and two cows circling him.

Yet we did sense an intriguing incipient theme of fake, imitation and reproduction, especially in the final moments, between Rose and Hazel. It's an amber/green light for a play which got somewhere in the end with many sweet moments.