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New York Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Weir' Review: A Few Pints to Help the Ghost Stories Go Down Easy
There's hardly a better escape from the city's heat right now than the Irish Repertory Theater's excellent staging of 'The Weir,' its fourth since 2013. The company's intimate Chelsea space is blissfully air-conditioned, and Conor McPherson's eerie 1997 drama, set in a rural Ireland of near-empty pubs and howling winds, is appropriately chilly. The production's entire creative team, along with some of the cast, are return players, but there's not a whiff of trotting out the same old. Instead, they render the play's talkative yarns as heartily as a few rounds with old friends. That sense of familiarity (and the awareness that they are such close-knit revivers) even helps the play, which is essentially a hangout piece with a hazy supernatural charge. Its tight 90 minutes track an evening at a pub owned by the 30-something Brendan (Johnny Hopkins), and frequented by the older Jack (Dan Butler) and Jim (John Keating). How regular are their visits? Jack's first move onstage, one he often repeats, is to breeze behind the bar to pour himself a pint. Unlike his also-unmarried patrons, and as played by Hopkins with homey charm, Brendan seems content with his mundane lot but is not yet resigned to it. There's a kinship, then, with the recently arrived Valerie (Sarah Street), who's being shown around town by Finbar (Sean Gormley), an older gent with a self-conscious Ian Fleming style. The men's hospitality, as they fill Valerie in on the area's lore, gradually turns into a series of ghost tales. Through offhand conversational cues ('What was the story with…?' or 'Where was that?'), McPherson is skilled at making reminiscences' jump into communal folklore feel both inevitable and necessary. It's typical campfire fodder — frightened widows and apparitions — and each story can be waved away, chalked up to nerves or having had one too many. But neither McPherson, nor the director Ciarán O'Reilly, leans on obvious spooks, though the production's lighting (by Michael Gottlieb) and sound design (by Drew Levy) supply the requisite dimming lights and stormy hums. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Weir' Review: Conor McPherson's Menu of Spirits
New York Are ghost stories more haunting when told in an Irish accent? In a cozy pub in an isolated rural town? With the wind battering the windows, sounding like the moaning of lost souls? After watching Conor McPherson's spellbinding masterwork 'The Weir,' now in revival at the Irish Repertory Theatre, I would argue that the unmistakable answers to those questions are yes, yes and yes.
Daily Mail
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Like a rolling stone, the marvellous Girl From The North Country has rocked back up at the Old Vic theatre...and 8 years on, it's even better than the first time round, says Georgina Brown
Girl From The North Country (Old Vic, London) Verdict: Knocking on Heaven's Door Rating: Conor McPherson's play set in 1930's depression era America is thrice blessed: by McPherson's extraordinary talent as a writer and director for creating a mood; by a remarkable ensemble of actors-singers-dancers playing the failures, fugitives and afflicted who inhabit his play; and by a soundtrack of 23 of Bob Dylan 's songs. He is the only playwright whom Dylan has favoured with such an opportunity. Beautifully integrated and transformed by Simon Hale's bewitching arrangements, the music seems to express the near inexpressible emotions of lost souls blowing in the wind. Revived at the Old Vic, where it started life in 2017, it is even more potent this time round. Back then, we wondered if it would work. Now we know it's a work of wonder. McPherson gathers his misfits in a run-down boarding house in Duluth, Minnesota. Best known for his haunting play, The Weir, he has a feel for lives trailed by the ghosts of dreams turned to dust. On Rae Smith's sepia-toned set, hotelier Nick (Colin Connor) is preparing stew for his guests, all in a rut or on the run. Dementia has robbed his wife Elizabeth of all inhibitions. An outstanding Katy Brayben sings like an angel, stamps like a rock star and dances like a whirling dervish. Meanwhile, Nick is failing to persuade his teenage pregnant black daughter Marianne (Justina Kehinde, marvellous) to accept a 70-year-old widower's offer of marriage. His wannabe-writer son Gene is drowning in rejection slips and drink. His widowed mistress (sparkling Maria Omakinwa) is plotting a way out. The respectable couple with a simple son are hiding something. There's nothing godly about Eugene McCoy's Bible-seller - but there's a true gentleness about Sifiso Mazibuko's once award-winning boxer. The first half finishes with a beautiful, heart-chilling, choral rendition of Like A Rolling Stone but this time, unlike the original production, the evening ends with a redemptive Moving On. Special, and not to be missed. Girl From The North Country is at the Old Vic until August 23. Nye (Olivier, National Theatre) Verdict: The end is Nye Rating: The end is Nye for Rufus Norris as Artistic Director of the National Theatre. His legacy show is a relaunch of last year's play by Tim Price starring Welsh superman Michael Sheen as the Welsh Labour politician Aneurin Bevan — the man who pushed through the foundation of the NHS after the Second World War. It commemorates his life, by recreating key scenes from it, while Nye hallucinates on morphine following surgery for a peptic ulcer in 1959. (The surgery revealed that he was actually dying of cancer.) Price has tweaked the play somewhat but it remains a two-hour 40-minute piece of high-spirited political hagiography. We learn of early experience fighting a speech impediment in an 'I am Spartacus' moment of school room collective action. You could even call it class war. But Nye really finds his voice in Tredegar Council, before becoming the Member for Ebbw Vale in Parliament and getting up the nose of both Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. At one point, the ghost of his father takes him down the mines to show him how to bring down the most coal by 'striking' in the right place. With Sheen wearing pyjamas throughout, and the huge green hospital curtains of Vicki Mortimer's stage design acting as veils of consciousness, Norris's production is certainly ingenious. Yet its invention masks a deeply nostalgic and deferential attitude. What could have been a coruscating indictment of today's low-alcohol left feels more like an obsequious and sentimental epitaph. National Theatre, London, until August 16; Wales Millennium Centre August 22-30.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Cheers to The Weir! What makes Conor McPherson's mysterious pub drama so mesmerising?
Appearances are deceptive. On the face of it, The Weir is not an exceptional play. Set in a rural pub somewhere in north-west Ireland, it is naturalistic and familiar. It does not call for fanciful interpretations or big directorial statements. Even its author, Conor McPherson, seems ambivalent. 'It was just people talking, so it shouldn't have worked,' he once observed. Audiences who saw JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 would have recognised the bar stools, the fireplace and the sleepy camaraderie. They would have sensed the timeless smell of peat and whiskey. So too would they have recognised the locals: practical men, variously shy, garrulous and funny, who are joined by an outsider, a mysterious woman from Dublin. They shuffle in, have a few drinks, share stories, then leave. But such a prosaic description does no justice to McPherson's play. For all its everyday trappings, The Weir takes a mesmerising hold. Audiences find it electrifying. The critic Michael Billington called its opening performance 'one of those nights no one who was there will ever forget'. He included it among The 101 Greatest Plays, alongside Oedipus the King, Macbeth and Long Day's Journey Into Night. What stood out, he said, was McPherson's 'narrative power, his gift for language and his ability to excavate the quiet desperation of the unfulfilled'. Ian Rickson's production opened in 1997 at London's Royal Court Upstairs (in exile at the Ambassadors theatre), and transferred to the Duke of York's, where it ran for two years. Broadway came next. McPherson, only 25 when it opened, won Olivier, Evening Standard and Critics' Circle awards. The Weir has duly attracted prestigious actors, the latest of whom, Brendan Gleeson, is about to play the mechanic Jack, in a production directed by McPherson in Dublin and London. Gleeson, star of The Banshees of Inisherin, calls the play 'profoundly moving, inspiring and ultimately hopeful'. First played by Jim Norton, Jack is one of the regulars in a rudimentary pub. Like barman Brendan and sidekick Jim, he is single – a reason to be prickly when the married Finbar, a hotelier, takes it upon himself to show around Valerie, a blow-in from Dublin. Taking it in turns to attempt to impress the stranger, the men spin supernatural stories. They are silenced when she then tells a devastating story of her own. Julia Ford was the first to play Valerie, performing for 60 people behind the curtain on the Ambassadors stage. 'It was the most intimate play I've ever been involved in,' she says. 'It was like they were in the bar with you. You were not really acting, just talking in a pub. After the first preview, people were really moved and saying, 'God, that was amazing.' It's a special play.' Behind the surface realism, The Weir has a haunting appeal. 'Mystery is the philosophical underpinning of life,' McPherson once told me. 'We don't understand who we are or where we come from. A fear of the unknown is very exciting on stage.' Ardal O'Hanlon warms to that idea. He played Jim, alongside Brian Cox and Dervla Kirwan, in Josie Rourke's 2013 production for London's Donmar. 'It lives in that liminal space between the mundane and the ineffable,' says the actor. 'It lives between past and present, natural and supernatural. There's real depth to it. It's an Irish thing: there is a healthy respect for the unknown, the mysterious and the supernatural in Ireland. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it's not there.' Lucianne McEvoy recognises that setting well. She played Valerie in Amanda Gaughan's production at Edinburgh's Royal Lyceum in 2016 and knows exactly the kind of bar-cum-talking-shop McPherson had in mind. 'My dad lived in the west of Ireland for the last 15 years of his life and was very much adopted by his Mayo family,' says the actor, currently appearing in Sing Street at the Lyric Hammersmith. 'His pub was Inche's bar in Ballinrobe. His little stool was kept for him. When I would visit, I would get an honorary stool pulled up beside him. The same characters were all along the bar and had the same amount of pints. It was like a ritual. If you were there, it was an honour to be there. Valerie probably felt very welcomed into that secret place.' That welcome is part of the play's emotional pull. Valerie, a woman in an all-male space, not only acts as a catalyst for the men's stories, but feels comfortable enough to reveal her own sad tale of loss. 'If she was real, I'm glad she happened to go into that bar,' says Ford. Valerie was even more of an outsider in Caitríona McLaughlin's production at Dublin's Abbey three years ago. Then, she was played by Jolly Abraham, a New Yorker who now lives in Ireland. With McPherson's blessing and a judicious tweak of the script, she played Valerie as newly arrived from Chicago. 'I've been in an old man's pub in Ireland, so I know what that feeling is,' says Abraham, back in rehearsal with McLaughlin for The Boy at the Abbey. 'As a woman, you know Brendan, Finbar and Jack are all putting on a bit of a show. Valerie is amused by who's peacocking and who's not, but also how everything being said is freeing her from her past.' The stories also draw in the audience. McPherson calls storytelling 'the most pure moment of theatre', one that demands our engagement. 'What's brilliant about the theatre is the audience is willing to do that work,' he said when I interviewed him in 2013. 'We are willing to go into what I call a collective trance. It probably goes to the nature of consciousness itself. We're constantly putting order on the chaos.' O'Hanlon agrees: 'Storytelling is central to human existence. It's how we process the world. The form of storytelling in The Weir creates a little bit of a distance from your own experience. You protect yourself by couching your experience in terms of a story. Jim's story is dark and disturbing, and you get the sense it is about something that happened to him in a way that he hasn't fully acknowledged.' Abraham picks up the theme: 'Storytelling, whether it's a myth, or 'Once upon a time …', or something that happened to you on the metro, you as the person speaking need to get it out, but you as a listener are also trying to find a way to connect, relate and latch on. All those people in that pub need to be heard and seen. It's primal.' 'Conor has a great ear for dialogue,' says O'Hanlon. 'It's not just the rhythm and the beautiful use of language, it's the jokes. He is a hilarious writer. As a standup myself, given that the play is in part a series of monologues, where each character gets their turn to shine, that's something that I relish. I could really bring those standup chops to the set-piece story Jim tells: a shocking, inappropriate twist on the ghost story.' McEvoy also relished McPherson's language: 'It's such a joy. You pay attention to the rhythms, the punctuation and how he phrases things. Valerie's monologue is long and you have to let one thought lead you to another. If you trust the writing, it's not about memorising it in a linear fashion, it's about being in each moment and trusting that the next moment will come. They'll line up. He's in the train of thought with you.' Ford says that this play that is supposedly 'just people talking' is anything but. 'This is why I think Conor is a genius,' she says. 'It is the combination of simplicity with themes that just go on and on. It's about all the things we go through: grief, loneliness, loss, the need for other human beings. I feel quite moved saying it: the raw, immediate, essence of what humanity is. And one of the most basic human needs is storytelling.' For McEvoy, storytelling is what brings together the characters and, in turn, the audience: 'In sharing the stories they are unburdened of something and we feel more connected. As a metaphor, that's what theatre is: we come together, we don't know most of the people around us, and we agree to bear witness to these mysteries.' The Weir is at the Olympia theatre, Dublin, from 8 August to 6 September. Then at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, from 12 September to 6 December.
Irish Post
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Post
Nichola MacEvilly talks art, activism, and why every Irish performer knows each other
NICHOLA MACEVILLY, from Sligo, trained in London, studying at Rose Bruford College and Central School of Speech and Drama. She is back in London currently in rehearsals for her latest show. Nichola MacEvilly (Pic: Jake Stewart) What are you up to? Right now I'm in rehearsals for Conor McPherson's Girl from the North Country at The Old Vic here in London. Have you worked with Conor McPherson before? I have indeed. Previously we brought Girl from the North Country to the Olympia in Dublin for six weeks before embarking on a 25 city tour of the UK. Conor's adored by everyone who is lucky enough to work with him. He's one of the greatest playwrights of our time, but he's also one of the best directors I've ever worked with. Most importantly he's very kind, and great craic. There are some other Irish actors in the play - have you worked together before? Colin Conor and I shared the Girl from the North Country stage before so it's great to be reunited with him. Myself and David Ganly had never worked together but we knew one another in that way all Irish actors know each other despite never having met. Great to finally work together. We also have a Tipperary man, James Berkery, as our associate movement director. Rehearsals for Girl From the North Country (Pic: Manuel Harlan) What is your favourite song in the show, and why? Oh, I couldn't pick a favourite but I do love Girl from the North Country as it's the one I get to sing myself. It's a haunting a cappella version arranged beautifully by Simon Hale. It underscores a particular moment in the show. A moment where light and dark, good and evil, reveal themselves simultaneously. I adore it. What led you into an acting career? There is a great theatre tradition in Sligo where I grew up and live. It wasn't uncommon for kids to recite Yeats poems and do Sean O'Casey plays at the Feis. We were very fortunate. I was very taken with theatre as a whole, and I suppose acting was where I landed within it all. I didn't have a eureka moment, or a calling to act. It's something that's settled with me over time. What is your favourite play? I've just developed a small obsession with Conor's new play The Brightening Air. I went to see it twice at The Old Vic, and bought the text. It's set in Sligo so I have a direct line to the world it's set within. It's a beautiful study of family, love, and the magical. I also love Tennessee Williams plays. I'd love to do Suddenly Last Summer one day. You were in a production last year with actor Brian Cox - what was that like? Yes we did Long Day's Journey into Night in the West End. Brian Cox is undoubtedly one of the finest actors of his generation. Eugene O'Neill's plays ask a lot of the actors who perform them, and Brian's character James Tyrone is one of the most iconic and challenging, so it was interesting to observe him navigate the challenges there. His contemporary Ian McKellen was doing Player Kings'in the Noel Coward behind us. The stage doors face each other so we had fun waving across every day. MacEvilly hails from Co. Sligo (Pic Anna Leask) What are your Irish roots? My dad was born in Sligo and my mum in Cavan Town. My mum is a Smyth from Main Street. They were living in Sligo when I was born but were visiting Cavan for Christmas when I decided to make my entrance on Stephens Day. I'm Sligo through and through but proud to have been born in Cavan like my mum's people. Where is your favourite theatre in Ireland? Hawks Well Theatre in Sligo. It was built by the people for the people. A number of the founders have passed away in recent years. We're very aware of their legacy. We owe them a lot. You will be playing Constance Markievicz later this year - tell us about that? Yes very excited about this. It's a project we've been working on for over 6 years. It's called Two Sisters and is created by Kellie Hughes with original compositions by Michael Rooney and Stephen Doherty. It's inspired by the two Gore Booth sisters Constance and Eva. It's a powerful blend of music, song, and spoken word adapted from their original texts and correspondence. It features myself and the singer Niamh Farrell with seven extraordinary musicians. Constance in particular has been unfairly represented in some cases I believe. We don't pass comment on that either way through the work but we do allow her own words and perspective to come through. What would you say has been your proudest moment on stage? Aside from Girl from the North Country of course, I'd have to say the first preview we did of Fun Home at The Gate Theatre in Dublin was a particularly memorable moment in time. The audience were invited members of the LGBTQI+ community and it was humbling to hear their audible reactions throughout the show. You could sense they were screaming 'Yes, I recognise myself in these characters'! It felt like an important moment in which our work had the potential to make a real impact on the lives of people who may ordinarily have felt excluded from the conversation. Which living person do you most admire? This changes regularly but the most consistent person has to be Mary Robinson. From her Irish presidency to her membership of The Elders, she has the ability to cut through the noise and speak with clarity and conviction without personal agenda or fear. What's the best advice you've ever been given? You didn't come this far just to come this far. What's the greatest lesson life has taught you? Be yourself, extremely and unapologetically. Your path is waiting for you when you truly believe that. Who/what is the greatest love of your life? My family and Smythy the dog. Girl from the North Country runs at London's Old Vic Theatre until August 23 See More: Girl From The North County
