Theater Review: The Ferryman, a great new tragedy

The Ferryman

Written by Jez Butterworth

Directed by Sam Mendes

Gielgud Theater, London

February 7, 2018

Jez Butterworth (b. 1969) has written seven plays, two of which (Mojo, Jerusalem) have won multiple awards in Britain. I was not prepared for the depth, detail, and emotional power of his most recent award-winning play The Ferryman, now playing in London’s West End. This 3½ hour play, set in the troubled times of the Northern Ireland civil war of the 1970s, simultaneously encompasses Irish identity, Shakespearean themes of revenge and fate, and an O’Neill-like feeling that maleficent gods are pulling the puppet strings of good people.

The title refers to Charon, the ferryman of Hades, who carried souls across the River Styx from the Land of the Living to the Land of the Dead. This play centers on an absent figure, a young man killed during the Irish troubles, whose body was never found (and properly buried), thus condemning him to wander the shores of the Styx, neither alive nor dead. The Ferryman portrays a large Irish family which is torn apart by this unresolved murder of a lost brother, itself wandering without resolution. The play relentlessly progresses from scenes of local Irish color to overwhelming tragedy over its 3+ hours, all driven by a taut relentlessness and sense of overlying doom that is never far beneath the surface. At the beginning, we only gradually learn about this tragedy, as the brother of farmer Quinn Carney (an overwhelmingly good Owen McDonnell) continues to be mourned years after his disappearance, his portrait enshrined over the kitchen door. Most of the first act is taken up introducing the big extended family (11 actors ranging from a real-live infant at his mother’s breast to the elderly, oracular, demented Aunt Maggie in her wheelchair). Eight more actors enter the play later, including IRA toughs and more kids from a nearby family. Director Sam Mendes is amazing in keeping this enormous cast, full of children and teens, choreographed and somehow individually distinct. The boisterous family singing, dancing, and joking provide a humorous overlay to the tragedy, much as Shakespeare’s fools do. The relentlessly developing tragedy therefore does not proceed linearly, but in peristaltic waves with increasing cumulative impact, finally capped by a shattering climax, much as happens in Hamlet.

Much of the genius of this play is the richness of its setting. The Ferryman is loaded with Irish Catholic themes and fertility symbolism: the large family, a pregnant wife and another with a real-live suckling infant (a first for me in the theater), a morally shaky priest, and live animals (rabbits, birds) that appear suddenly from within actors’ clothing. It is set entirely within the living/dining room of the family home. Much as in Tracy Letts’ August, Osage County (2008), an Oklahoma version of a family rent by death, the multiple characters are brought together for a second act dinner.  As in August, the dinner brings dysfunction, resentment, and shame to the foreground. The Ferryman feels Irish in the same way that August, Osage County mirrors the American midlands and A Streetcar named Desire reflects the American South. Seeing powerful emotions play out in an exotic “foreign” culture somehow compels the viewer to generalize the intense emotions to humankind.

Given the large cast of 20, playwright Butterworth creates several memorable individual characters. Quinn Carney (Owen McDonnell), the brother attempting to avoid letting the disappearance/murder of his brother destroy his carefully built family is a well-drawn classical Shakespearean tragic character, caught between his own denial, others’ evil, and fate. Oedipus like, he only gradually realizes his entrapment by fate, slowly developing into a great tragic character worthy of O’Neill or Shakespeare. This is one of the great roles written for the modern stage. The spectral Aunt Maggie (Stella McCusker), presiding silently in her wheelchair, also feels like something from Greek tragedy: she intermittently gains mental clarity and then remember details from the family’s past that help them (and us) understand more of the history. Intermittent appearances by outsiders, here tensely-menacing IRA leaders, eager to disassociate themselves from the brother’s disappearance, build additional tension. Overlying the mystery of the brother’s death is perhaps a greater tragedy, as the fresh-faced teen boys wrestle with whether or not to join the IRA, sacrificing family for cause. In choosing the Irish “Time of Troubles” from 30-40 years ago for his play, Butterworth follows the lead of Shakespeare, who often based his tragedies on violent or tragic events from 1-2 centuries prior, understanding that placing drama in familiar history allowed his audience to reflect on the events’ current relevance. In contrast, writing about a current event, as most modern plays do, sometimes catches the viewer up too directly in their own immediate politics and views, and prevents a generalization to universal truths.

So, in his choice of setting/time, use of symbolism, scope, size of cast, and length, Butterworth has written an ambitious tragedy derived from Greek drama, Shakespeare, and O’Neill, yet linked to one of the great historical tragedies of our recent past. In this it goes a step beyond the masterful August, Osage County in ambition and universality. While I could see the basis of these great dramas on this work, the play has a very individual stamp of both language, pace, and setting, and did not feel derivative. It is fully a match for the great tragedies I have referenced, and I left the Gielgud Theater feeling much as I do after leaving Hamlet, Macbeth, A Streetcar Named Desire, or Mourning Becomes Electra—that I have been part of some swirling universal calamity that detaches me from my moorings. This is perhaps the best play of this century, and I hope you will see The Ferryman when it inevitably comes to the USA. It plays in London with this magnificent cast through May.