The Weir with Brendan Gleeson – West End review
- Christopher Harding
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Conor McPherson’s production, marking Gleeson’s West End debut, runs at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 6 December
What a great play Conor McPherson’s The Weir is. It seems so simple, five people gathered in a pub on a winter’s night, telling each other stories. Yet within that frame, McPherson weaves words with such care and precision that it never loses its tautness.
It is both naturalistic and numinous, an astonishing achievement when the playwright premiered it in 1997 at the age of 25, and just as wondrous today, with a fine new cast headed by Brendan Gleeson as the mechanic Jack, one of the regulars in a bar in rural Ireland.
He’s there, passing the time with barman Brendan (Owen McDonnell) and his friend and sidekick Jim (Sean McGinley), when their richer neighbour Finbar (Tom Vaughan Lawlor) breezes in with a newcomer – a mysterious Dubliner called Valerie (Kate Phillips), who has rented a house in the area.
The tone is jokey, realistic. All the men are, to some extent, trying to impress Valerie, vying with one another to show their cleverness. Finbar, whom Vaughan-Lawlor gives an endless twitchy energy, talks about “one calendar day” and incurs Jack’s scorn. Valerie’s request for white wine causes consternation and much teasing of Brendan when he uncorks an ancient bottle someone has bought him. The words rub up against each other like so many familiar friends; these are people who talk all the time about nothing, whose sense of themselves is built through quiet, daily interactions.
But then they start to tell ghost stories, each darker and more frightening than the last, the tales of fairy roads and staring figures on the stairs, as embedded into their lives as the Silk Cut they share and the “small ones” they drink. As they start to worry about scaring Valerie, they also console themselves with the idea that there is always an explanation for a supernatural encounter – someone was drunk, or ill, or gullible. Their seriousness is leavened with humour, with good-natured joshing and occasional confrontations.
Each performance is pitched perfectly. McDonnell gives Brendan a taciturn charm that hides his loneliness; McGinley makes Jim’s sudden bouts of garrulousness as revealing as his bitter remarks about his sick, elderly mother.
But as each story unfolds, McPherson, as director, also lets silence and stillness fall across Rae Smith’s cluttered set, dimly lit by Mark Henderson. Only the wind, evoked by Gregory Clarke’s sound design, punctuates the narratives. “It was this type of night…” says Jack. “Am I setting the scene for you?”
But then Valerie tells her story of loss, and it is as if the men are frozen. They listen intently, barely moving as she paces restlessly around the room, trying to make sense of her grief. This is a ghost story of a different level of feeling and, in Phillips’ understated gentleness, it is full of contained pain.
It changes the mood, and the play shifts a gear, moving deeper into darkness but also into a different sense of community where each of the men sympathise in their different ways with her sadness. As the night closes in, and just three of them are left around the stove, Gleeson tells the final story of the night, of failed love, youthful arrogance, missed opportunities. “Well. That wasn’t a ghostly story. Anyway. At least.”
But it was, because his final memory is full of the life that haunts him, the possibilities that have slipped away. Gleeson, making his West End debut at the age of 70, is towering, a great bear of a man, shambling round the bar, his craggy face a picture of different thoughts and feelings, his eyes always bright and watchful. In his final moments with Valerie, before the long night ends, he finds a kind of grace – a warm flicker of hope and friendship.
It is a staggeringly good production of a play that is already a classic, that does so much by seeming to do nothing. It opens with a snatch of Strauss’s “Lost Songs”, that great evocation of overwhelming love and loss. But it ends with a different kind of empathy, the kind that keeps people alive. It’s terrific.
4/5 Star rating
