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Now tell the dead man that you're the one dying
I can't decide what I think of Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman (2017). I read it this afternoon at Porter Square Books; I was attracted by the title and the cover art which showed a human silhouette rippling darkly in a pool of turf and water. On the one hand, I am pleased to read any author who has imprinted so hard and visibly on the bog poems of Seamus Heaney—set in Northern Island at the time of the 1981 hunger strike, the play opens with the discovery by turf-cutters of a corpse which looks ancient as the Tollund Man but quickly proves to belong to a man who disappeared ten years previously, Disappeared it now looks like; his brother was an IRA ex-soldier and his wife was told for years that he'd been sighted here and there, as if he had just abandoned her and their son. You can weigh the past down with stones, bind its wrists and put a bullet in its head, but it'll float to the surface sooner or later, dredging buried love and resentment and revenge while the dead man's family gathers for the annual harvest, echoing year-kings and cycles of sacrifice. The plot is about silence, about ghosts and complicity. Dialogue-wise, it's often very funny in the way of large colliding groups of people even as the action is heading as obviously nowhere good as a Greek tragedy. Classical references are woven throughout. It's got myth to the teeth even before the banshees show up. And I couldn't tell from reading if it would work. I mean, it clearly works. It got produced. It's still running in London. It's getting a Broadway transfer in the fall. But on the page, all of it feels so neat that I can only believe in odd corners of it, like the spellbinding, only sometimes lucid aunt who tells two different versions of the man that got away—one to the children, one to his memory—or the teenage boys who needle one another with half-adult machismo until one of them gives away something he shouldn't, maybe the same kind of something that got his cousins' uncle shoved under a bog in the first place. The ending is shatteringly violent and did not surprise me except in that it felt theatrically, not organically inevitable. Like there's Sophokles and then there's melodrama. I have to assume it is different in performance: that it feels live and buffeting instead of so carefully patterned for humor and horror that neither lands with any weight. I feel like I'm being unfair. I know scripts are skeletons. There is also this thing where I am an American reader trying to evaluate an English writer's play about some (Northern) Irish people which I haven't even seen for myself. But I thought from the first couple of pages that I was going to love it and finished it thinking, "Well, maybe I'll like Britannia." tl;dr if you start with a bog body, how can you screw it up?
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I think if it got a local production I would definitely want to see it. I just often enjoy reading plays, so to have one not really work for me was odd, especially given the subject matter.
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Dreamwidth ate my comment. Restart.
In this case, I had trouble with the shape of the play more than the dialogue, but it is true that I have believed many implausible turns of plot just because the actors believed them.
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(Also, The Opener is probably my favourite Camp Cope song!)
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Yeah, that!
(Also, The Opener is probably my favourite Camp Cope song!)
It's the only one I've heard! What else do you recommend?
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I wonder how it would go in Belfast...these kinds of works always completely shapeshift when they have to confront the reality of Here rather than English perceptions of Here. There's a yawning chasm between the two, one I had no idea about until I moved here.
[edit: Interesting reflection on this, with a riposte from down south.]
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Britannia is very weird, but also quite entertaining. I can see why it popped up when we were searching for Vikings - it's got a lot of similar aspects to it. And I see the similarities in your description of The Ferryman, too, the mystical, the sacrificial king, the humor.
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That makes sense to me. How did it come into focus?
[edit: Interesting reflection on this, with a riposte from down south.]
Thank you! That's really interesting and exactly some of the critical evaluation of the material I knew I was not qualified to perform.
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I FORESEE NO PROBLEMS WITH THIS PLAN.
(Do you have bogs where you are? Will anyone miss that coach?)
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Bog.
Bog bog?
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Thank you! I'll check them out.
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I am beginning to lean toward the hope that I get the chance to see this one, just to find out whether it would work when acted for me.
Britannia is very weird, but also quite entertaining. I can see why it popped up when we were searching for Vikings - it's got a lot of similar aspects to it. And I see the similarities in your description of The Ferryman, too, the mystical, the sacrificial king, the humor.
I am bad at committing to television because of the time required, but I'm seriously thinking about trying it. It looked in some ways like the logical successor to the Roman sections in Alan Garner's Red Shift (1973). Is the first series complete or is it open-ended?
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The pilot is extra-length, but individual episodes are under 45 minutes long, so it's not that much of a time commitment when you're watching it streaming on your own schedule. We tend to watch two a night, two or three times a week. (We pretty much never watch shows while airing - we don't actually have television, and we don't like WIPs - so this is our MO for most TV.)
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Are you kidding? I'm honored!
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The Heaney connection makes me interested to see how it manifests in the play.
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That may be. I expected a weirder play than I got.
The Heaney connection makes me interested to see how it manifests in the play.
It manifested for me most strongly through the link that Heaney makes between ancient sacrifice and sectarian violence:
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity:
with the Dying Gaul
too strictly compassed
on his shield,
with the actual weight
of each hooded victim,
slashed and dumped.
—"The Grauballe Man"
I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,
who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
—"Punishment"
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
—"The Tollund Man"
The dialogue of The Ferryman is not as explicit as the poems, but even the Irish myths retold by the character of Aunt Maggie Faraway—the Fomoiri and the Tuatha Dé Danaan—are about murders and reprisals between two sides.
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For me, it was an election about six months after I moved. The English media were shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that there a) was a NI political party with sufficient influence to determine the formation of a government in Westminster and b) what the policies of that party are. [I recommend not googling said party further, if you are having a pleasant day it should stay that way]. There was much tut-tutting. It carries beyond their media.
...I tend to shut up and learn after moving to a new place, there's always a lot to pick up. But people not knowing the more recent history of their own country-of-many-years is something I'll get angry about.