Now tell the dead man that you're the one dying

[sovay]

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?

Comments

[gwynnega]

It sounds intriguing, though I often have trouble judging a play on the page.

[kore]

One problem I often have with reading plays is sometimes they seem really contrived to me without the human actors embodying the words. This happens more often with modern plays though, I don't know why.

[thawrecka]

That sounds both interesting and frustrating.

(Also, The Opener is probably my favourite Camp Cope song!)

[selidor]

Huh, that sounds fascinating. Sadly I have no plans to be in London before it closes.

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.]

[selkie]

LET'S MAKE A BOG BODY AND FIND OUT.

[isis]

It sounds interesting! I agree, reading a play is so very different from watching one.

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.

[ashlyme]

This sounds fascinating at the very least. And you've already done good work with bog bodies.

[radiantfracture]

It sounds as though genre conventions took over from organic form, maybe?

The Heaney connection makes me interested to see how it manifests in the play.