The Seafarer

The Seafarer
By Conor McPherson. Presented by Hoy Polloy at fortyfive downstairs, CBD Melbourne. 30 July – 10 August 2014

10.30am on the day before Christmas.  A crummy basement flat in a Dublin suburb.  James ‘Sharkey’ Hardin has finished (or was he fired?) a job as a chauffeur down south.  He’s come ‘home’ to look after his now blind older brother, the irascible, aggressive and none-too-clean Richard.  As Sharkey’s past comes out, he’s revealed as a sad but angry and violent loser and even a murderer long ago.  An alcoholic, he’s trying to stay on the wagon – an enterprise his brother regards with skeptical contempt.  As he would.  Richard is pretty much an alcoholic too – as are the other characters here.  A central theme of the play is the deleterious effect of alcohol, symptom of a wider malaise.  Blotting out the world and one’s own insignificance in it is understandable given this world and these characters. 

Richard and Sharkey’s friend, Ivan, has stayed overnight, too drunk to go home.  Now he’s head-splittingly hung-over, can’t find his glasses and worries that his wife is going to kill him.  Sharkey, already derided and much put-upon, discovers that Richard has invited one Nicky Glblin over for some Christmas cheer.  Nicky’s living with Sharkey’s ex and driving Sharkey’s car – and there’s not a thing Sharkey can do about that or the impending visit.  But first the trio must get a taxi into town to stock up on the Christmas cheer.  The shopping list is almost entirely made up of alcohol.

There’s a sense of déjà vu here: is this an Irish play we’ve seen before – or something very like it?  The Leenane Trilogy (reviewed here by me some weeks ago) springs to mind.  There’s the symbiotic relationship of an angry, manipulative disabled individual and their guilty, trapped carer.  The barrage of abuse and relentless put-downs – albeit ‘funny’.  The alcoholism.  The casual violence.  The squalor and hopelessness.  Priests and the Catholic Church, however, are not mentioned.  Instead, this play goes – or veers - in an unexpectedly different metaphysical direction, but until that happens, the style is a kind of grating naturalism.

But you get pulled in.  You go along with it because of the crisp clarity – and indeed economy - of the writing, the building tension and the excellent, widely experienced cast. 

The star turn is possibly Geoff Hickey’s Richard.  Mr Hickey not only segues from his character’s needling, teasing and bullying into sycophancy when a surprise guest arrives, he is totally convincing as a blind man.  Barry Mitchell, as Sharkey, has that wonderful ability to let us know what he’s thinking and feeling without speaking.  Sharkey is pathetic, weak and even despicable, but Mr Mitchell makes us care about his fate – even if only just.  Adam Rafferty, a big, bulky man, plays Ivan.  It’s a nicely layered performance: an obliging, hen-pecked ‘nice guy’ on the surface, but with a calculating self-interest – and, yes, violence – beneath.  David Passmore as Nicky is uneven, as if lacking in the confidence the others display, but then his character has no objective and the role is rather functional: he’s there to rub in Sharkey’s failures and to bring the surprise guest, Mr Lockhart, whom he says he met in a pub.

It is with the arrival of Mr Lockhart (Michael Cahill) that the play steps up to a radical turn from naturalism into something like magic realism.  Mr Lockhart is always ‘Mr Lockhart’ as distinct from the easy intimacy of the others.  No spoiler here, but suffice to say that Mr Lockhart knows all of Sharkey’s crimes and misdemeanors, even the most recent, and now seeks a reprise of the card game they played twenty-five years previous.  The prospect terrifies Sharkey as you might expect, but a deal is a deal.  Mr Cahill, as Lockhart, is a commanding presence.  He’s tall, well-dressed, confident – a few social classes up from the rest, slumming happily for a drink and a card game with the lads – and he suggests a quiet menace from the moment he arrives on stage.   Alone with Sharkey, he becomes lyrical in a way that suggests extreme loneliness and a yearning for rest.  Mr Cahill pulls that off.

Wayne Pearn’s direction, sharp casting and performances aside, feels a touch sluggish in the opening, but that may be opening night settling in.  Nevertheless, the set-up feels longer than it needs to be.  The action all takes place in the space of less than twenty-four hours and on a single set that says ‘neglect’ and ‘defeat’ perhaps too loudly.  Design is by George Tranter.  The lighting, by Stelios Karagiannis, is somewhat perfunctory and lowering the light level during two hander exchanges between Sharkey and Mr Lockhart seems a little obvious.

The playwright, Conor McPherson, has been described as ‘the finest playwright of his generation’.  Say what you like, this play has been nominated for many major awards and performed in many places. 

Like his contemporaries, the McDonagh brothers, Mr McPherson no longer lives in Ireland; he just writes about a certain aspect of it – but, I suggest, to a higher purpose.  The ‘Gaelic Tiger’ may be nowhere in sight and evidently came nowhere near this strata of society, but Mr McPherson uses a milieu he clearly knows to ask some a bigger question than, ‘ What’s the matter with Ireland?’  The writing is, as remarked, of a high order, less cluttered with showing off than Martin McDonagh’s.  The introduction of Mr Lockhart – or rather, who he is – may be a contrivance too far, but it depends on what you want to make of it.  Here we’re asked to think about something like this: what if you made a deal with your immortal soul as collateral, so you walked away from a heinous crime and then – and this is the worst part – did nothing to change your life thereafter?  Then your fate hangs on a game of cards.  And if Sharkey were to be ‘saved’, is he redeemed or is it mere chance?  Thus a bunch of drunks and a game of cards on Christmas Eve open out to questions of life and fate. 

Michael Brindley

Images: Michael F Cahill and Barry Mitchell; Michael F Cahill, David Passmore and Geoff Hickey; & Geoff Hickey, Adam Rafferty, Barry Mitchell, David Passmore and Michael F Cahill. Photographer: Fred Kroh.

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