The Ferryman – love and hate: who will pay the price for freedom? (Bardic Theatre)

A man who disappeared is found dead in a bog after ten years of sporadic not never terribly reliable reports of sightings. It’s no mystery how Seamus ended up there. But those responsible can’t afford for it to be spoken about in case the narrative around the dying hunger strikers is disrupted.

Set in 1981, this tragedy and the impact on an extended Carney family sets the scene for Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman which recently received its première on the island with a production by Bardic Theatre.

The play has the heft of a five- or six-part TV miniseries with three acts and two intervals stretching over three hours. The first act contains some gorgeous writing that reassures the audience that Butterworth can tell a story, eking out details and context just in time but no earlier than absolutely necessary.

The opening scene with a County Armagh parish priest summoned to a dubious location in Derry establishes that menace goes hand in hand with secrets that are as yet unshared. The rest of the action is centred in a rural kitchen. Stuart Marshall’s set comfortably holds 20 of the 22 actors at one point. It’s cosy but never cramped. New characters drift in during the first act like an extended visual joke: you think you’ve met them all and then a door opens or another pair of legs appear at the top of the stairs.

It’s a farmhouse as full of regrets as the barn is stuffed full of hay bales. Love abounds, along with a steady supply of hatred.

We meet a gregarious but controlling man who has long regretted encouraging his brother to join the IRA.

His wife regrets opening her home up in someone’s hour of need.

A widow regrets who she married but works around her the house like a slave tending to an adopted family that will never truly be hers.

A bitter aunt is a staunch republican whose forlorn lust never turned into proper love.

A doting aunt is prone to a spot of prophecy when she’s lucid (and has the singing voice of an angel).

Young girls mull over what a happy life would look like, and older sisters who must soon plan their escape.

A babe in arms is passed from sister to aunt and never held by his mother. Brothers work hard and play hard on a farm only one of them can inherit.

A son has lost his father but might be caught in the same gravitational trap of destruction.

A bore can’t help telling stories even when no one will listen and heed the warnings amongst his ramblings.

A whole household pulls together to bring in a good harvest and secure their finances for the coming year.

A priest who carries the secrets of confession along with the secrets of his own sins.

A young lad who might yet regret stepping onto the conveyor belt that will carry into the next generation of gangster.

And well-formed but trite and insincere phrases trip of a paramilitary leader’s tongue as he tries to regain control in the face of truth.

Much is familiar and everything is enticing.

Oh, and there’s a killer living on the farm, but does anyone know or care?

Like nearly every play in this troubled genre, the final scene is merely the opening of the next tragedy. (Except for the steady trail of people who had booked lifts and taxis far too early and prematurely took their leave from the auditorium, taking with them with a much gentler ending before the deadly denouement. Though these same exiting theatregoers also managed to disrupt the moment we finally learned more about the play’s title.)

With an intergenerational cast of 22 stretching from a babe in arms, to children, young, middle aged and elderly actors, there’s no professional company on the island that could find the finances to stage The Ferryman. But fear not, for this amateur production did the play justice. The cast and director (Bugsy McMahon) has a firm grasp on the darkness and the light.

Claire McCrory plays Seamus’ widow Caitlin as a woman who has been through the emotional wringer and can fight no more. She never stills, serving the Carneys who have sheltered her and her sullen son Oisin (Seán Óg Ryan) these past ten years. Bugsy McMahon plays a domineering Quinn, brother of Seamus, dictating the next steps of everyone in his presence, young and old. The only man to challenge him is the sinister Mr Muldoon (Peter Cunningham) from the Derry IRA.

Quinn’s children get a long scene with their infirm Aunt Maggie (Catherine Herron) that ups the madness of the past, present and future. While the eldest Quinn daughter, Shena (Brianna McGuckin at the performance I attended), walks around listening to punk tracks like Teenage Kicks on her Walkman headphones, her acerbic Aunt Pat (Julie Deery) is listening to the news, silently until she can take no more of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s pronouncements about republicans and she inflicts it on everyone in the room. The Carney and visiting Corcoran boys are given time on stage to explore how the next generation might chose to hold their republican ideology: it’s sobering to hear such a range of opinions and views on what is just.

The theatre audience are entertained and unsettled in equal measure. The only Englishman in the village (Tom Kettle played by Brian Mills) steals scenes with his Doctor Doolittle presence. There are laughs – the appearance of a live rabbit as well as a goose whose rhythmic honking leaves just enough time for Mills to utter his lines into the gaps – and moments of sadness. Late night blindfolded Connect 4 is played with surprisingly good strategy. Everyone wants to be free of something. But can any of them bear to pay the price to break free from the sins of other generations?

The characters’ drinking – adults, youths and even children – is relentless and the constant refilling of glasses does become a distraction. A bit more variation in the light outside kitchen’s lone window could have better established the changing time of day. But these are mere niggles.

Bardic Theatre’s production of The Ferryman deserves to be on the main stage of the Lyric Theatre every bit as much as Brian Friel’s Translations back in 2022. It was an ambitious choice to produce – albeit one which Bardic alumni like Fra Fee have starred in – but the creative team together with the cast succeeded in bringing Butterworth’s story to life. It’s an amazing achievement.

“This is not the conversation we should be having” is a blocking response that Mary Carney (played by Rachel Molloy) is accused of using when her husband Quinn wants to talk about matters of the heart. It’s also a possible rebuttal to Butterworth’s play. Do we need to talk about the disappeared? (Yes.) Does this play represent real life? (It might, but it doesn’t have to as it’s art, and making us think is even more important than absolute authenticity.) Will we see this play again? (Probably not unless someone makes it into a film.) Questions and conversations that were as apt and necessary in 1981 when the play was set, nevermind when it was first performed in 2017 or still today.

The Ferryman finished its run at the Lyric Theatre on Saturday 6 April after performances in Donaghmore, Armagh, Derry and Cookstown. 

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