Conor McPherson's The Weir - Quietly Homeric

Watching a different production of a contemporary play was a novel experience for me. Nearly fifteen years had passed since I first saw The Weir. How different would this second viewing be, and what would a decade and half of cultural wanderings add to the experience?

  

I first saw Conor McPherson's The Weir when it was first staged back in the late 90s, and my diary records some insubstantial and unengaged thoughts. 

"Me and GJ watch a play called The Weir at the Duke of York Theatre. Moody and atmospheric it involved Irish characters telling ghostly stories in a pub. I thought it was a bit hit and miss, whilst GJ found it odd and dreary. We grabbed some food at Bella pasta afterwards, where GJ, of course, found his pasta too dry." 

So, a real lack of detail from me, choosing instead to dwell on GJ's culinary preferences rather than explore exactly why I found the play 'hit and miss'. What was I liking; what did I dislike? Truth be told, I suspect that I didn't quite get it. On a second viewing though I found The Weir wonderful. Here was a play that smouldered with regrets and passions expunged; hilarious and sad, sometimes at the same time; full of Joycean paralysis and the bar-room hilarity of Roddy Doyle at his best. The performances were note-perfect, a lovely awkward chemistry filling the stage. You left the theatre feeling slightly drunk, as if you too had in fact just spent an evening in a rural and isolated Irish pub.   

The Weir cast (left to right): Peter McDonald, Brian Cox, Ardal O'Hanlon, Risteard Cooper, Dervla Kirwan

Reading back my own initial thoughts left me even more confused. What had I missed the first time around? What did other people think? Would anyone react to this Weir in the way that I had done to the earlier one? I sought out the reviews - very well received - and then dipped ‘below the line’ - a favourite pastime - to see what the general public thought. Perhaps someone would come to the aid of my earlier puzzled self. There was, indeed, a real split between those who loved it and those who were left cold. The following comment, though, caused me to delve deeper:

"Utterly tedious. Did the critics go to another play called The Weir that was the polar opposite to this pap? A pointless story, poorly told, dully staged and not particularly well acted. Brian Cox has clearly employed Russell Crowe's voice coach; his Irish accent was all over the shop. Very off-putting. Dervla Kirwan's big speech is excruciatingly awful. It's like she's reading it from cue cards. Ardal O'Hanlon is the one bright spot, albeit a very dull bright spot. I spent most of the second half of the play wondering if I'd fallen victim to some massive spoof, thinking surely nothing this bad could make it on to the West End stage? But it wasn't and it is."

Aside from the problems with Brian Cox's accent - a common criticism from the naysayers, and one that I didn't detect - the aspect of this that got me thinking was the reference to 'cue cards' and Dervla Kirwan's performance. Kirwan plays Valerie, a Dubliner on the brink of moving to the remote rural location where the play is set. Shown around by Finbar, a brash businessman, they find themselves sharing an evening in the pub with the landlord Brendan, car-mechanic Jack, and his assistant Jim. Jack, Finbar and Jim each tell a ghostly tale, which is then followed by Valerie's own story concerning her young daughter’s tragic drowning at the local swimming pool. It is the way that Valerie tells this story that seems to have rankled the above critic the most. 

For me though it was spell-binding. And yet, I'd partially agree with the critic, that there was an element of 'cue cards' about the monologue. But only because this is, indeed, the way we tell those stories that stick with us, those that we tell others - and ourselves - over and over again. Homer's oral tradition paved the way for how stories are remembered and told. In the days before near-universal literacy, when things were not written down and were spoken out loud around the fire, poets had to remember tales in other ways. They did this through mnemonic techniques, repetition of key lines and tropes, the same ways of describing a character or a temporal change - grey-eyed Athena, swift-footed Achilles, crafty Odysseus, rosy fingered Dawn – a ritual made up of verbal building blocks that are then embellished with detail. Likewise, the characters in The Weir are doing something similar. 

Rembrandt, Homer (1663)

Ritual and repetition are the glue that binds the way that these characters talk to each other. The following is a routine repeated three or four times in the play:

Jack: “Are you having one yourself?”

Brendan: “I’m debating whether to have one?”

Jack: “Ah have one and don’t be acting the mess.”

Brendan: “Go on then.”

And there is certainly an element of this when Valerie tells her story, one concerning the cruellest and most painful blow of all, the loss of a child. How many times had she repeated and rehearsed this story in her head? How many more times will she tell it? Even in a single day, she would be telling herself this tale over and over again. No wonder it comes across as rote, as if read of a set of cue cards, a set of inescapable cards that occupy her every waking moment. What could she have done differently? How could things be otherwise? Every time she tells it, she must feel on trial. Telling it over-correctly, trying not to make a mistake, pausing to remember the tiny moments of hope where things may have been different, grasping for those cue cards in case she is found out.  In case she finds herself out.  

“But when I got in, I saw that there was no one in the pool and one of the teachers was there with a group of kids.  And she was crying and some of the children were crying.  And this woman, another one of the mums came over and said there’d been an accident.  And Niamh had hit her head in the pool and she’d been in the water and they’d been trying to resuscitate her.  But she said she was going to be alright.  And I didn’t believe it was happening.  I thought it must have been someone else.  And I went into, a room and Niamh was on a table.  It was a table for table tennis, and an ambulance man was giving her the … kiss of life.”

Storytelling: "You have to relish the details!" Dervla Kirwan and Brian Cox

Remember the furore about the parents, particularly the mother, of Madeleine McCann. That 'maddened' and 'cold' and thus ‘guilty’ look in her eyes as if she wasn't telling the truth. Perhaps she herself couldn't believe the truth. Perhaps the guilt of leaving her small child unsupervised coursed through an overwhelmed consciousness and didn't spare her the energy to act 'naturally'. No wonder these tales come out as if they have been rehearsed. They have. They never stop being rehearsed.

Even GJ and his pasta preferences have something of this; if we went out for an Italian meal tomorrow someone would be sure to bring up the adjective 'dry' even before the menus have arrived at the table, sparking the usual jokes and ribbing.    

I didn't get The Weir all those years ago. I just wasn't ready for it. I thought it was a play about ghost stories when really it was a play about how we tell those stories, using techniques as old as Homer himself. If we tell them well, they are remembered and told over and over again. And if they are our most personal and most affecting stories, it's not just others that we are telling them to, it is ourselves.