PETER CRAWLEYreviews The Weirat the Gate Theatre in Dublin while GERRY COLGANreviews The Towerat the Bewley's Cafe Theatre
The Weir
Gate Theatre,
Dublin
"Ah now, you have to enjoy it," says Seán McGinley's Jack, somewhere between the elaborations and embellishments of a perilously tall tale. "You have to relish the details of something like this, ha?" That could serve as Conor McPherson's treatise on storytelling in The Weir, a play of lonely souls in rural isolation, embroidering their tense conversation with supernatural yarns, which made the playwright's name in 1997.
It could also be the guiding note of Garry Hynes's adept new production, which nudges delicately at the play's conceits with a subtly subverted realism - it takes a while before you notice that Francis O'Connor's confined, roofed set contains no windows - but recognises that God, among other spirits, is in the details.
Shifting the remote, dilapidated Leitrim pub from "the present day" to 1993, Hynes observes the tenor of pre-boom Ireland with the rigour of a period drama. The bar's patrons, now a little ghostly themselves, smoke indoors with impunity, pay in punts and tut over European holiday homes: the Germans are coming.
So is Valerie (Genevieve O'Reilly), a Dubliner in search of "peace and quiet", whose presence is enough to unsettle the insular world of four men as unfamiliar with women as with white wine. As Jack, the exceptional McGinley is both gregarious and guarded, his well-rehearsed story of fairy forts and apparitions punctuated with gestures as sharp and defensive as judo chops. Denis Conway, who has a great eye for the vain swagger of Finbar, the self-inflated property dealer, stills his comic energy for his spook story, while Mark Lambert's more caricatured, simple Jim relays his tale like a fevered dream.
Hynes renders each monologue as a distinct performance, the speaker isolated while the others - including David Ganly's endearingly ineloquent barman, Brendan - act as hushed audience. The commanding tone and superb ensemble allow for wind-rustling cliches - often you feel as though you're in the bar, rapt in its spell - and appreciates McPherson's gift for incantatory rhythm.
It is more problematic, to my mind, when Valerie counters the stories (always deflated as "only an old cod") with her own private tragedy, a true event funnelled into the same artificial patterns of build, suspense and reveal.
Like the weir of the title, Valerie may stand between still waters and rushing release, but neither Hynes nor O'Reilly find a way to elevate her beyond a device, and she remains a slight, simpering presence.
That's why Jack's final story, which McGinley delivers in arresting staccato surges, is the more moving, told without a twist or a twinge of the supernatural. Speaking to deliver himself from darkness, to keep out the cold of isolation, he opens his personal dam. Ultimately, McPherson suggests, it is the person, not the story, who grows with the telling.
Runs until August 16th
PETER CRAWLEY
The Tower
Bewley's Cafe Theatre
Joe Joyce's new play, which has started a lunchtime run at Bewley's, is set in the Martello Tower in Sandycove. The cognoscenti will immediately associate this with James Joyce's novel Ulysses, and they would be correct; the play is a study of Joyce and Oliver St John Gogarty, who lived together briefly in the tower, and are immortalised in the book as Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan.
Here we meet the real pair during an after-death reunion in which they immediately begin to resume the hostility that marked their relationship in life. Joyce resented Gogarty's upper-crust, moneyed status and despised his attempts to write creatively, regarding him as a journeyman author.
Gogarty, who had a better opinion of himself, was embittered by being famous mainly for Joyce's portrait of the plump Buck. His success as a surgeon and a senator did little to mollify him, and he eventually emigrated at the age of 61 to became a US citizen.
Joyce had many faults. He was disloyal, an inveterate scrounger and self-centred to an extraordinary degree. But he was, on the indisputable evidence of his writing, a genius who regarded his total commitment to his art as justification for all his exploitative actions.
Joe Joyce (no relation) adds little to this familiar picture of the pair, whom he sketches accurately enough. He is fortunate in his actors. Tom Hickey's Joyce projects a convincing intense eccentricity, and Bosco Hogan has just the right man-of-the-world poise for Gogarty. Caroline Fitzgerald's direction, and her set co-design with Alice Butler, contribute to a satisfying hour.
Runs until June 28th
GERRY COLGAN
