ROUGH SEAS
‘The Ferryman’ navigates Anglo-Irish destiny
Jez Butterworth's “The Ferryman,” which opened Sunday night at Broadway's Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, packs more juicy and prophetic Anglo-Irish storytelling into a fantastic single night than any cable drama.
Your tiny screens do not hold 21 live actors, a seeming bushel of live rabbits, a scrawny-necked, Tony Award-seeking goose and a wide-eyed baby, surely worried stiff about what the riven Irish family into which he has been plopped portends for his own life.
Disappearances — be they sudden or gradual — are a constant in “The Ferryman,” which is set in 1981 in County Armagh, during The Troubles, when Margaret Thatcher was showing no humanity to Bobby Sands, the ailing hunger striker languishing in prison.
In the first scene, we stand with a terrified priest (Dean Ashton) and hear about the discovery of body of the long-absent Seamus Carney in a bog, his corpse pickled by the peat. And we intuit that, years ago, he displeased the local militants of the IRA, led by Mr. Muldoon (Stuart Graham), a cruel gangster determined that a dead man's reappearance cause him no trouble.
That trouble would most like come from the dead man's brother, Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), who has abandoned the struggle in favor of a chaotic family life harvesting the land. His farmhouse, the setting for the rest of the play, holds a seething mass of mutually dependent humanity—teens, pre-teens, oldsters, barnyard creatures and, festering under it all for Quinn, the fraught but essential possibility of sex with Quinn's sister-in-law, Caitlin (the perfectly cast Laura Donnelly), a passionate woman who does not know she is a widow until we watch the news arrives at her door.
For the first few minutes of “The Ferryman,” as you watch a happy couple play Connect Four and dance all night to the Rolling Stones, Butterworth tricks you into thinking Quinn and Caitlin are the married parents of this extended brood—until, you meet Quinn's actual wife, Mary (Genevieve O'Reilly), a distracted, self-absenting figure who recalls Eugene O'Neill's Mary Tyrone, especially as she descends the long staircase in Rob Howell's set, coming and going from her bed in the not-so-heavenly rafters.
But that love triangle is only part of the story.
Broiling with ambition, “The Ferryman” is a play about the persistence of Anglo-Irish enmity.
Conflict, it argues, is in all of our bones; the same ones that also care for our kids. One thing is for sure: “The Ferryman” argues it was no fun to grow up in Ireland in 1981, especially if you are a young warrior, like Rob Malone's Oisin Carney.
The only moment of the show that feels theatrical, as distinct from real, is the tricky final violent climax, which this cast does not quite pull off.
But by then, The Ferryman” already has carried its passengers on an epic, threeact, three-hour-and-15-minute journey in which you feel like you've watched human destiny play out before your eyes — but credible and even, at times, sufficiently joyous to make you believe that we can still find moments of happiness despite our destiny of strife.
Kids, sex, whisky and human kindness all help. But change nothing, really.