McPherson's "Seafarer' at the Arden (1st review)

New York's Irish Repertory Theater recently performed all 26 of William Butler Yeats's plays. I'd read them a good while ago but had never seen any staged. They are in truth walking poems, but they make wonderful theater anyway, for Yeats is the lord of the modern English language. Watching three of them on a visit, I could see Synge, O'Casey, Beckett, and the rest of the modern Irish stage ready to hatch.

The only thing absent was obscenity. How, I wondered, did Shakespeare and Shaw ever get along without the F word?

Mind you, demotic speech is peppered with obscenity, and one of the functions of theater, at least in modern society, is to record it. After a half-century of Pinter, Mamet and many lesser lights, though, I'm ready to call time-out.

Of course there was no such luck to be expected with Conor McPherson, the gifted young Irish playwright who curses with the best of them, and whose new play, The Seafarer, closes the Arden Theatre's season. This, after all, is the writer who has stated, "The day I read Glengarry Glen Ross . . . I knew exactly what I was going to do." He's been doing it ever since.

One character who's out of place

In The Seafarer, two brothers, Richard and Sharky Harkin (Brian Russell and William Zielinski, respectively), live in a basement flat in Dublin. Richard, the elder, is blind; Sharky cares for him, none too willingly. A scapegrace neighbor, Ivan (Anthony Lawton), provides comic relief.

The first act gets by mainly on booze and bathroom jokes until the appearance of a mysterious Mr. Lockhart (Greg Wood), a well-dressed and well-spoken toff who seems entirely out of place in these surroundings, but whose presence is accepted without question. It turns out, once he and Sharky are alone, that he is Humanity's Oldest Friend, and that he has come to claim a debt.

The Lord of Hell, as we know, is the only personage ever to walk the earth (apart from Jesus, whose appearance was transient) who knows the delights of heaven. Milton was very much struck by this point. Perhaps it's what gives an edge to the Devil's temper. Sharky feels a bit of it at the beginning of Act II, and it looks very much like being embraced by an electric eel.

Good manners

Mr. Lockhart isn't above raising his voice, too, when no one else is about. But he would never so far forget himself as to swear. Manners are, after all, our last possession, and Humanity's Oldest Friend is nothing if not self-possessed.

I cannot tell you what a blessing it felt on a modern stage to realize that, whatever else might ensue, at least one character would never curse. As so often happens, too, even in these times, a single polite person raises the civility of everyone else.

The Devil, however, is also a sportsman, and surely there can't be a better poker night than Christmas Eve, which, at least 'til morning, is one of his favorite moments of the year. The stakes, to be sure, are a little unusual, and it's not every day you get to see a blind man play poker.

The plot of The Seafarer, as McPherson notes, is based on local legend, though the ending is his own. Sinners going to Hell used to be a staple of the medieval stage, and even the modern one in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Mozart's Don Giovanni. In these skeptical days the deck is a little stacked against the Devil, but it's always good to have him back on the boards. Hell may be simply other people, as Sartre says, but some of us would still prefer pitchforks.

Lawton's small comedic masterpiece

If McPherson's play is flawed and a bit hokey, under David O'Connor's direction the Arden's all-male cast— including Joe Hickey as a second neighbor— is excellent, and the ensemble work is wonderfully crisp, especially when the card game gets going. With such uniformly fine work it is hard to pick favorites, but Anthony Lawton's Ivan, spun from relatively threadbare materials, is a small comedic masterpiece.

Conor McPherson hasn't been accused much of sentimentality, but there's a touch of it in The Seafarer. If this world is all we have and hell is truly other people, then, come to think of it, heaven must be the very same thing. Or is that the most depressing thought of all? To each his own conclusion in the matter.â—†




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