Latest news with #TheWeir
Business Post
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Business Post
‘I felt like I was screaming in a vacuum' - Brendan Gleeson on broken elder care and a return to theatre
Business Post subscribers can read: • Why Brendan Gleeson says The Weir carries a message young people need now more than ever • How his parents' final days changed how he sees elder care • Why he called Micheál Martin a 'moron' on live TV — and why he still doesn't regret it Sitting across the table from me could be Mad Eye Moody, with his magical swivelling eye and wooden leg, ready to share his dark arts ...
New York Times
2 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
2 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.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- 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
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Post
Kate Phillips, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Seán McGinley join Brendan Gleeson in The Weir
A STRING of top acting talent has been announced among the cast for a West End revival of Conor McPherson's The Weir. Seán McGinley, Kate Phillips and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor will all feature in the play, which also stars the previously announced Brendan Gleeson, who will make his West End debut in the production this September. The award-winning actor, who has starred in the likes of The Banshees of Inisherin and Paddington 2, will lead the revival of McPherson's 1997 play, which runs at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin before making its way to the Harold Pinter theatre in London. Brendan Gleeson will make his West End debut in The Weir 'Conor McPherson's The Weir is one of the rarest plays around,' Gleeson said of the role. 'The last time I appeared on stage was ten years ago, at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, where I started my career. 'I can't wait to be back there, and then to play in the West End for the first time, at the beautiful Pinter Theatre – and to work with Conor on his profoundly moving, inspiring and ultimately hopeful play.' The full cast includes Brendan Gleeson, Owen McDonnell, Seán McGinley, Kate Phillips and Tom Vaughan-Lawlot The full cast has now been announced for the new production, which has been written, and directed for the first time, by McPherson. Owen McDonnell, of Bad Sisters and Killing Eve fame, will star as Brendan, with McGinley, playing Jim, Phillips as Valerie and Vaughan-Lawlor, who first shot to fame as Nigel 'Nidge' Delaney in the RTÉ One series Love/Hate, as Finbar. Running at the 3Olympia Theatre from August 8 to September 6, The Weir transfers to London's West End from September 12 to December 6. Tickets for the West End run are on sale now via
