Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman is about as close as
theatre gets to delivering a sprawling epic confined to a single evening. Set
in Ireland of the 1970s, during “the troubles,” it’s part family drama—as we
get to know the Carney clan, from the oldest great aunt to the youngest
grandchild (an actual onstage baby), and all the parents, offspring, friends
and sibling between, who live in and/or congregate in the large family
farmhouse—and part thriller, as the IRA past of patriarch Quinn (Brian d’Arcy James) comes to make
demands on him, long after he thought he was out and done.
The
reason I went to revisit the play was to see the largely new set of actors in
lead and supporting roles—all US performers, in for the UK West End veterans of
the production…and I liked it even better. By coincidence or a savvy casting
director’s design, most of the new leads are drawn from the ranks of musical
theatre (it’s musicals for which they are beast known, at any rate), and
they’re a terrific match to the material, its predominantly Irish accents,
which are themselves implicitly musical, and the sensibility, threaded with
both light and mordant humor.
Perhaps
no one better exemplifies this than Fred
Applegate as the avuncular anecdote-teller and philosopher Uncle Patrick.
In the great tradition of American character actors with such easy command of
craft that you never catch them acting, his mere entrance signals both gaiety
and gravitas. As the friend who accompanied me observed, “His timing is
perfect. And he knows it, And he hides that he knows
it.”
As
the powerful, slow-witted neighbor Tom Kettle—very much “like one of the
family” but also, in troubled times, conspicuous as the sole Englishman—Shuler Hensley dips into the reserve he
keeps for characters such as Jud Fry and the monster in Young Frankenstein. It’s the kind of role he can deliver falling
off the proverbial log, but there’s no sense that he’s relying on a bag of
tricks. It’s a restrained, sensitive, sad-funny portrayal.
The
aforementioned Mr. James is an excellent leading-man hub for all the action; opposite
the blissfully subtle Holley Fain as
Caitlin (wife of Quinn’s long-missing and almost certainly dead brother) they
make the restraint of unconsummated love a lesson slow-boil alchemy; and Emily Bergl,
as the third triangle point, Quinn’s chronically ailing wife, is a similar study
in grand contrast, creating her protective wedge with a camouflaged edge. And
where would any of these folks be, dramatically speaking, without the hovering
menace of the IRA crime boss? Ralph
Brown’s lethally soft-spoken Muldoon provides that nicely.
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