Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman: Already This Season’s Best Play

In Northern Ireland in 1981 The Troubles pit Irish against Irish, resulting in a great deal of anguished, epic drama. Think Michael McDonagh, and the movies of Ken Loach. In Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, at the Bernard B. Jacobs theater on Broadway, a monumental 3 hours and 15 minutes zip by, beginning with the news: the body of a ten-years missing man, turned up in a bog, hands and feet bound. Nearby his wife holds the fort, living in her husband’s brother Quinn’s lively household with her son, now a teen. To celebrate the harvest they are cooking goose, and just as the family learns the news about the recovered body, the once live bird hangs on a hook at the kitchen window, bound, emblematic of Seamus’ remains, best left to the imagination.

The running story was that Seamus had vanished, gone to Liverpool. Maybe. But Caitlin (a fine Laura Donnelly) his wife knows better; yet, as Penelope did, she hangs out waiting for news, or a body, enjoying the raucous family life and attentions of Quinn (Paddy Considine in his Broadway debut). The Ferryman, like the plays of O’Neill, is replete with classical references including the titular “ferryman,” cited in a reading of The Aeneid, who cannot bring the dead from life’s shore over the river Styx unless the body is buried.

After a recent performance we ran into Fionnula Flanagan who plays Aunt Maggie Faraway, seated onstage in a wheelchair, a teller of tales, and the play’s oracle, mystically far away as her name suggests. Flanagan noted that Sam Mendes’ direction was meticulous, his eye on every detail and movement of a cast of 22, the chaos and exuberance of family life cleverly orchestrated including dancing and singing. Flanagan laughs when a fan tells her she has a lovely voice: “I don’t even sing in the shower.”

Regina Weinreich

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