When I received the mailer for the imminent Broadway transfer of Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman from its London run, I was impressed to read that the new play had copped most of the awards the Brits give out for professional theater. I checked out some of the reviews the production received and saw that it garnered near-universal praise. It sure looked and sounded like something I couldn’t ignore, so I called my friend Diana and proposed we get seats if she was also interested and check out the production ourselves. I called Telecharge and booked a pair of seats for the 7:30 performance at Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on Saturday evening, 27 October.
On Monday, 22 October, I heard Roma Torre of NY1, the
proprietary news station of Spectrum cable service in New York City, praise the
“richly stocked play” as “a gorgeous sprawling yarn that encompasses
the entire spectrum of human existence.”
Then, that afternoon, I read Ben Brantley’s laudatory notice in the New York Times. Brantley, calling the play “thrilling,”
raved, “No matter what sort of spread you’ve planned for your Thanksgiving
dinner, it won’t be a patch on the glorious feast that has been laid out” in Ferryman.
Now, I’ve often had differences with Brantley’s reviews, so
I usually discount his more extreme assessments—raves or pans—and try to
cherry-pick his descriptions. I wondered
about this one, though, because of Torre’s enthusiastic review earlier—even though
NY1 isn’t what I consider a major assessor of theater. But since the play got glowing reviews and
took most of the theater awards in London, lots of people really liked it. I went to the theater with immense optimism
that Saturday evening.
Boy, was I sorely disappointed! I was nowhere near as impressed as either Brantley
or Torre. I hadn’t figured out exactly what
to make of Ferryman yet, but my
initial impression (after 3¼ hours) was that it’s a mess of a play, an
everything-but-the-kitchen-sink script (except that there is a kitchen
sink!). (The cast is something like 21 speaking
actors—plus a 9-month-old infant.) The
ending as a shocker, but pretty much comes out of nowhere. Oh, and Diana hated it. She said something about it being a “Trumpland”
play—all violence and hatred. That’s
sort of true, but the comparison’s way too simplistic to be useful or valid. But let’s back up a bit.
The Ferryman is
set in County Armagh in Northern Ireland in 1981, during the worst of The
Troubles. The 1981 hunger strike among
IRA prisoners in Maze Prison (near Belfast) for the right to be classified as
political prisoners began on 1 March. Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher rejected the reclassification and by the summer,
when the play is set, nine of the hunger-strikers, including the leader, Bobby
Sands (who’d been elected to parliament in April), had died in the infamous
H-Block. (Eventually, 10 would starve
themselves to death.)
At the beginning of the play, we learn that the body of
Seamus Carney, an IRA fighter who disappeared 10 years earlier, had just been
accidentally uncovered, with a bullet hole in the back of his head, in a bog in
the south. This is the catalyst that
launches the events of The Ferryman—and
lest you think it’s too much of a convenient coincidence, this story is the
factual kernel that inspired the play.
In 2012, actress Laura Donnelly was working with Butterworth
on The River (2014-15 on Broadway;
also starring Hugh Jackman and Cush Jumbo).
She and Butterworth, who are a couple, were watching a TV documentary
about the “Disappeared” during the Troubles and she recognized a photo of her
uncle, Eugene Simmons. Donnelly’s
mother’s brother, Simmons had disappeared in 1981, the same year in which The Ferryman is set, and his body was
found by a dog-walker in 1984. When the
actress pointed this out to Butterworth, he was incredulous, and then began
digging out some of the details in talks with Donnelly’s mother. Though he had long resisted writing a play
about Northern Ireland, that tale of how the Simmons-Donnelly family coped in
those interim years became the center of the drama of The Ferryman’s Carney clan, a family of former IRA fighters and
supporters, then by 2016 had become Butterworth’s seventh play (he’s written about
10 produced screenplays as well, including the 2015 James Bond flick Spectre on which he collaborated with director
Sam Mendes, who staged The Ferryman, plus
several television projects), his first new stage work in five years.
The Ferryman
opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 24 April 2017 and ran until 20 May; it
transferred to the West End’s Gielgud Theatre on 20 June 2017, closing on 19
May 2018. It won 2017 Evening Standard Theatre Awards for Best
Play, Best Director (Mendes), and Emerging Talent (Tom Glynn-Carney, who plays Shane
Corcoran); the play also won the 2018 Laurence Olivier Awards, the London
equivalent to New York’s Tonys, for Best New Play, Best Actress (Donnelly as
Caitlin Carney), and Best Director. The
production garnered several other awards and nominations before moving to the
Jacobs Theatre on 45th Street west of Broadway, beginning previews on 2 October
2018 and opening on 21 October for an open-ended run. Much of the original Royal Court and Gielgud
casts traveled to the U.S. with the production (including Donnelly, playing a
version of her own aunt, the wife whose husband’s fate was unknown for so long).
Jeremy “Jez” Butterworth was born in London in 1969. He has three brothers who are all in the film
business: Tom and John-Henry are both writers and Steve is a producer. Jez and brothers Tom and John-Henry have
collaborated on screenplays and Jez and John-Henry together won the Writers
Guild of America’s 2011 Paul Selvin Award for their screenplay for the 2010
film Fair Game. Jez directed the 2001 film Birthday Girl, starring Nicole Kidman,
which was co-written by Jez and Tom and produced by Steve.
Jez Butterworth’s break-out play was Mojo, which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995. It won the 1996 Laurence Olivier Award, an Evening Standard, Writer’s Guild, and Critic's
Circle Award. Butterworth adapted the
play for a 1997 film which featured playwright Harold Pinter, who became an
important influence on the young dramatist’s work. He went on to write five more plays,
including Jerusalem (2009) and The River (2012), both of which made the
transfer across the Atlantic to play on Broadway (2011 and 2014
respectively). One of Butterworth’s
recurring themes, as seen in both Jerusalem
and The Ferryman is how history and
events of the past, thought long buried, can determine events of the
present.
At three hours and 15 minutes (including one intermission
and one short break) and comprising 21 speaking parts (plus one babe-in-arms),
the story of The Ferryman is too
complicated to recap in detail here, as it would use up my allotted word-count
with synopsis. It would also probably be
too complicated to follow; it nearly was to see. (I also don’t want to spoil the horrendously
surprise ending by describing it here!) So
I’ll give a synopsis of a synopsis of the plot.
(The text of The Ferryman was
published in 2017 by the Theatre Communications Group.)
In a short prologue, set in Derry (aka: Londonderry) “a day or two earlier” than the rest of Ferryman, menacing IRA chieftain Muldoon
(Stuart Graham) reveals to Father Horrigan (Charles Dale) the discovery of the
body of Seamus Carney, who disappeared on New Year’s Day 1972 when he was 20
years old. Found in a peat bog in County
Louth, just across the border with the Irish Republic, the corpse had had a
bullet in the back of the head. The
common belief is that Seamus had been executed in retaliation for his suspected
defection from the IRA as a British informer. Caitlin Carney (Donnelly), Seamus’s widow, and
their 14-year-old son, Oisin (Rob Malone), live on the farm of Seamus’s older brother,
Quinn (Paddy Considine), in rural County Armagh—about 65 miles southeast of
Derry.
Quinn Carney’s had his own involvement with the IRA, but left
the struggle to devote himself to working the family farm and looking after his
ailing wife, Mary (Genevieve O’Reilly), and their seven children (Bobby, 9 months
old – played by various infants; Honor, 7 – Matilda Lawler; Mercy, 9 – Willow
McCarthy; Nunu, 11 – Brooklyn Shuck; Shena, 14 – Carla Langley; Michael, 15 –
Fra Fee; JJ, 16 – Niall Wright); he’s long been silently in love with
Caitlin. Also among the household are
Quinn’s uncle Pat (Mark Lambert), a Virgil-quoting souse (the play’s title is a
reference to Charon, the boatman who ferries the souls across the River Styx to
the underworld in The Aeneid), and
his aunts, Patricia (Dearbhla Molloy), a staunch and bitter Irish republican, and
Maggie (Fionnula Flanagan), a gentle soul, known as Aunt Maggie Far Away, often
lost in a world her own thoughts and memories with sporadic periods of lucidity
in which she recounts family history and prophesies of the children’s futures. Also present is an English farmhand, Tom
Kettle (Justin Edwards), a large, slow-witted man (think Lennie in Of Mice and Men) whose capacious pockets
provide amusement for the younger Carneys.
As the family celebrates their harvest ritual with the help
of three young cousins from Derry (Declan Corcoran, 13 – Michael Quinton
McArthur; Diarmaid Corcoran, 16 – Conor MacNeill; Shane Corcoran, 17 – Tom
Glynn-Carney), they find their lives upended by the arrival of Muldoon and his
two henchmen, Frank Magennis (Dean Ashton) and Lawrence Malone (Glenn Speers),
out to intimidate the Carneys from saying anything about Seamus’s death and the
discovery of his body. The final
confrontation, fed by anger and bitterness, leads to a horrible, tragic, and
unlooked-for act.
As I begin writing this report, I still haven’t sorted out
what the hell Butterworth is on about!
The Irish Troubles are over (despite continuing tensions between the
Irish and the English), so he must be making some point indirectly—but I don’t
see it yet. Whatever it is, does it
really require 21 characters and three-plus hours to make? I think there’s a lot of unnecessary mishegoss going on on the Jacobs stage—family
stories, war stories, and tall tales; drinking bouts; songs; dances; and fights
(the choreographer is Scarlett Mackmin and the fight directors are Terry King
for the UK and Thomas Schall for the US).
It all seems self-indulgent clichés that don’t advance a point (and some
of which, like the excessive drinking, even among the teenagers and “wee-uns,”
and the fighting, may even offend actual Irishmen and -women who see the
play—Butterworth is, after all, English).
(On the matter of insulting Irish stereotypes, IrishCentral, which bills itself as “the
leading Irish digital media company in North America,” posted an article called
“Smash British play ‘The Ferryman’ accused of insulting Irish hits Broadway” [https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/others/smash-british-play-accused-of-paddywhackery-hits-broadway]
which reports on another article by Sean O’Hagan of the Guardian in which the author complains of the clichés and
stereotypes about the Irish people with which Butterworth fills his play. Published a month after the play reopened at
the Gielgud—after the “ecstatic” reviews of the Royal Court and West End
performances had come out—O’Hagan’s article, entitled “Critics loved The
Ferryman. But I’m from Northern Ireland,
and it doesn’t ring true” [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/16/jez-butterworth-the-ferryman-irish-stereotypes-sam-mendes],
complained:
Everything was overstated, turned
up to the max; out came the inevitable roll call of characters-cum-caricatures:
the compromised priest, the bitter republican aunt (shades of James Joyce’s
Catholic aunt, Dante Riordan, from Portrait of the Artist . . .),
the alcoholic with the heart of gold and the menacing IRA men, who, in this
instance, moved from silently threatening to the point of caricature. Then there’s the drinking: not just the
alcoholic uncle, but the whiskey-slugging dad, the sozzled teenage sons and—wait
for it—the children allowed thimblefuls of Bushmills for breakfast. Comedic, for sure, but so close to a cultural
stereotype as to be offensive.
(The journalist, who’s actually from County Armagh, explains:
No one else seemed to mind the
cliches and the stereotypes of Irishness abounding here: the relentless
drinking, the references to fairies, the Irish dancing, the dodgy priest, the
spinster aunts—or the sense that the play ties itself in knots tackling ideas
of place, loyalty and community. Butterworth and Mendes fill the stage with
noise, movement, songs and stories, but once that bravura energy had subsided,
I was left with that familiar sense of unease, of dislocation. What I had witnessed, and in part enjoyed, was
a play that revealed more about English attitudes to Ireland than it did
about Northern Ireland.
(O’Hagan detailed several other disturbing references and
lamented what they play could have been but wasn’t. Usually, I dismiss that kind of
criticism—telling the writer what she or he should have written—and try to
stick with examining what the playwright did write. In this instance, however, I had to
sympathize with O’Hagan because, even though I’m not Irish—or even British—I
had the same reaction, if somewhat less articulate or heartfelt. The IrishCentral
writer summed up O’Hagan’s discomfort by observing that The Ferryman “presents a caricature of the Irish, the worst
possible depiction of them and plays to the stereotype of the drunk and
fighting Irish so many British have.”
Even I, outsider though I be, could feel that—maybe because I come from
a people who are also frequently caricatured by others, usually for nefarious
purposes.
(By the way: I didn’t discover the IrishCentral commentary or O’Hagan’s article until I began writing
this report, weeks after seeing the play and forming my reaction. I’m reporting it here now because it
coincides with something that stuck in my own craw almost three weeks ago.)
According to some critics and reviewers, the two central
metaphors of The Ferryman are the
burial place of Seamus Carney’s body and the harvest setting of the plot. Peat bogs are notorious for preserving bodies
interred there. Magennis, one of the IRA
enforcers, reminds Father Horrigan that “there’s no oxygen down there. The peat is acidic. It pickles you. The years roll by and nothing changes.” Seamus’s body was found virtually intact,
watch, wallet, sneakers, bullet hole, and all, just as he was the day he died
ten years earlier. Butterworth, the
analysts say, is writing about the bitter harvest of long-ago hatreds and anger
and how the present generation reaps what their predecessors planted. (The Atlantic
headline for its on-line review of the London mounting was “Jez Butterworth on
the Legacy of Hate.”) The playwright
reinforces his point by observing that the same bog that held Seamus Carney’s
body has yielded up prehistoric corpses so well preserved that they bore clear
evidence of centuries-old murders. We need
only look at the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, Hindus and Indian
Muslims, Turks and Kurds, which, like many other historical hostilities, are
inherited by generation after generation ad
infinitum. (Do we need a chorus here
of “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”? You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
/ . . . / To hate all the people your relatives hate . . . .)
The Carneys’ harvest celebration is fraught with its own
problems even before Muldoon and his thugs arrive. I don’t necessarily disagree with this
conception as a dramatic theme, but it’s not a new idea (isn’t it what Oedipus Rex and Romeo and Juliet are basically about?) and I dispute that
Butterworth has really explored it beyond the immediate events of the
play. He certainly hasn’t suggested a
way out of the tragic rut—is he telling us we’re doomed forever to repeat this
pattern, like a cosmic Groundhog Day? Furthermore, I think the
three-and-a-quarter-hour play is so larded with distractions and digressions
that the point the dramatist wants to make is lost in the camouflage and
clichés. In light of the critical
response, both in London and here, I have to conclude, though, that Diana and I
are close to a minority of two. (Out of
59 published notices Show-Score
surveyed as of 15 November, there was one sole negative review, with a score of 35, and only four
“mixed”—two 60’s and two 65’s. There were four reviews the site rated 100
and 23 more with scores between 95 and 99.
As enthusiastic as they were, both the Times and NY1 notices I quoted near the top of this report were
only scored at 95! We’ll see what some
of them said to deserve those ratings later in my report.)
In terms of production values—irrespective of the dramatic
impact—I have to say that Mendes provided an impressive staging. I could have gone with a tighter show—fewer
characters and about an hour less running time—but given that caveat, the
director, designers, and performers all did magnificent work. The
Ferryman, as presented on the Jacobs stage, was an excellent ensemble
creation of a living world—chaotic and overflowing its boundaries, but vibrant
and alive. (I’m also overlooking the
clichéd nature of many of the incidents and characterizations. I guess you could say I’m compartmentalizing
my evaluation.) In fact, it’s such an
ensemble that I can’t very well single out one or two actors—so I won’t. Actors like Considine, Donnelly, Edwards, and
Malone as Quinn, Caitlin, Tom Kettle, and Oisin stand out because of the
prominence of their roles, but as individual performances, they blend in with
the gem-like work of Flanagan as Aunt Maggie, Glynn-Carney as Shane Corcoran,
or Lambert as Uncle Patrick. (Special mention must be made for the for the
children, especially the “wee-uns” who took to their roles with the same verve
and commitment as their older castmates.) Together, these and the 14 other speakers,
plus the baby and the live goose (yes, there’s not only a kitchen sink, but a
real, live goose in The Ferryman) to
create the vivid impression of a breathing diorama, a universe in a bottle into
which we have a peephole. It was almost
hyperreal, what with a real baby, a live goose (and a live rabbit), the detail
in the set dressing and it shows up in the detail of the acting choices as well—but
then, Mendes is a film director.
That diorama exists on the kitchen-dining room-family room
of the Carney farmhouse. Fifteen lives
have unfolded in this little biosphere, designed with verisimilitude (and a
long, vertiginous staircase) by Rob Howell, lit with appropriate naturalism by Peter
Mumford, and accompanied by a soundscape by Nick Powell that includes radio
reports of the hunger strike at Maze and several songs, including early ’80s
pop and some traditional Irish music. Like
the acting, each of these elements contributes to the universe conceived by
Butterworth and Mendes. The costumes,
which seemed perfect for the play’s milieu, were also by Howell and along with
the make-up, hair styles, and wigs of Campbell Young Associates contributed to
the illusion of a world in which real people live. Mendes animated the little world with as much
truth as Butterworth’s script provided, but it’s unfortunate that the life
within the diorama walls was less effective than the performances deserved.
The critical response to the New York City production (not
dissimilar from the London reception) was largely very positive. Ninety-one percent of the 59 notices on Show-Score were positive (of the four
100’s, two were for New York Stage Review
and the Daily Beast; the 99 was for City Cabaret, and the two 97’s were Front Row Center’s and NewYorkTheaterScene.net’s, all websites); 7%
were mixed, including the 65’s for the Observer
and New York magazine/Vulture and the 60’s for Medium and Exeunt magazine; IrishCentral’s
lone negative review, a 35 rating, represented 2% of the published reviews in Show-Score’s tally. My round-up will cover 27 reviews. (Show-Score
included several outlets from outside New York City such as the Washington
Post, Chicago Tribune, Australia’s
Limelight magazine, and The Stage from London; I’m sticking to
New York-area or national publications and sites.)
Observing that The
Ferryman is “[l]argely devoid of the self-regarding pretentiousness that
made [Butterworth’s] previous plays unwatchable,” Terry Teachout described the
play in the Wall Street Journal as “a
kind of Irish counterpart to ‘August: Osage County,’ a 3 1/4-hour study of a
close-knit rural family that is being pulled apart, in this case by the
poisonous effects of political fanaticism.”
The WSJ reviewer continued
that “it builds to an explosively potent surprise ending whose force is
diminished by the fact that it takes Mr. Butterworth most of the garrulous
first act to finally get down to dramatic business.” Directed “with unobtrusive clarity” by
Mendes, Teachout reported that the “marvelous” cast “features a taut, stoic
performance by Laura Donnelly that won her an Olivier Award in 2017 and will
very likely win her a Tony this time around.”
The Journalist concluded by
advising readers, “See ‘The Ferryman’ by all means, for most of it is superb.
Bear in mind, though, that it would have been significantly more effective had
it been an hour shorter.”
The Times’
Brantley, which I already noted gave the production high praise, added that the
play has “a generosity of substance and spirit rarely seen on the stage
anymore.” He dubbed the play an “endlessly
vibrant work, directed with sweeping passion and meticulous care” by
Mendes. The result of this combination,
the Timesman asserted, “is theater as
charged and cluttered and expansive as life itself. And the three and a quarter
hours and 21 speaking parts required to tell its story—which is at once a
shivery suspenser, a hearthside family portrait, a political tragedy and a
journey across mythic seas—barely seem long enough to contain all it has to
give us.” In Brantey’s opinion,
Butterworth “mines the folksy clichés of Irish archetypes—as garrulous,
drink-loving, pugilistic souls—to find the crueler patterns of a centuries-old
cycle of violence and vengeance.” This
all fits together, said the reviewer, in “a propulsive plot that never stops
churning forward even as it keeps looking backward, conjuring a cyclical
nightmare of history from which no one escapes.”
In the New York Daily
News, Chris Jones declared that The
Ferryman “packs more juicy and prophetic Anglo-Irish storytelling into a
fantastic single night than any cable drama upon which you might ever hope to
binge.” Jones characterized
Butterworth’s writing style here as
reaching for an O’Neill-sized epic
after five years with no new plays, but his extraordinary West End transfer
here also recalls the naturalism of Emile Zola and the riven political dramas
of John Millington Synge, not to mention his numerous shout back to the
Sophoclean ancients and their harvest-time storytelling. At the same time, he embraces many of the
tropes of old-school Irish melodrama.
In the end, the Daily
Newsman affirmed that Butterworth’s play “has carried its passengers on an
epic, three-act, three-hour-and-fifteen-minute journey in which you feel like
you’ve watched human destiny play out before your eyes—but credible and even,
at times, sufficiently joyous to make you believe that we can still find
moments of happiness despite our destiny of strife.” His one complaint was: “The only moment of
the show that feels theatrical, as distinct from real, is the tricky final
violent climax, which this cast does not quite pull off.”
Matt Windman of amNew
York proclaimed, “When it comes to theatrical flair, Jez Butterworth’s
explosive ‘The Ferryman’ has pretty much got it all.” Windman reported that the play, “masterfully
directed,” treats “themes of family tension, sexual heat, divisive politics and
betrayal [which] come to climax in an unsparing finale.” The amNY
writer asserted, “In lesser hands, ‘The Ferryman’ may have come off as pure
hokum, but Mendes makes it absolutely entrancing” and especially praised
Donnelly, who “brilliantly conveys Caitlin’s raw vitality, vulnerability and
stifled rage.” In conclusion, Windman
observed:
“The Ferryman” is certainly
reminiscent of “August: Osage County,” another long-winded family melodrama that
managed to pack a powerful punch. Many
other plays are opening on Broadway this fall, but they are unlikely to match
the excitement and finely-tuned ensemble acting of “The Ferryman.”
“Three-plus hours fly by in this riveting drama about an
Irish family during The Troubles,” was Barbara Schuler’s “Bottom Line” in Long
Island’s Newsday. Calling the play “riveting,” Schuler
described The Ferryman as “a sweeping
family epic, vast in scope and characters,” affirming that “the vivid family
dynamics [are] brought to life with care by a cast that has no weak links and
by director Sam Mendes.” The Newsday reviewer asserted that the play
comes “as close to a Greek tragedy as you’re likely to find in a modern work.” He confessed at the end “that after watching
this story unfold for more than three hours, I was surprisingly reluctant to
let the Carney family go.”
In the Observer, one
of the “mixed” reviews (65), David Cote opened his notice with a quip:
“Sure yer a feckin’ eejit, now
give us a wee drop of Bushmills and . . . um, Éirinn go Brách!” I don’t think this exact line occurs in The
Ferryman, but given the three hours of peaty blarney troweled up in Jez
Butterworth’s family epic, the law of probability says we can’t rule it out.
Cote observed that The
Ferryman is “a play of reckless overabundance. Twenty-one actors onstage (plus a bemused
baby), three acts and countless speeches to serve a somber tragedy . . . . In scale and ambition, the work models
fecundity and plenitude; so why does the final harvest feel so scant?” The Observer confessed:
On paper, the new piece combines
the writer’s fondness for anarchic communes and mytho-grunge storytelling with
the gangsterism of the Irish Republican Army during the Thatcher era. It’s all wrapped in a bucolic,
multi-generational package, an allegorical microcosm of Ireland: The best bits of Martin McDonagh and Conor
McPherson, filtered through Butterworth’s rock & roll vibe. I ought to adore this play.
He admitted he “wasn’t bored,” and that Mendes’s “firm,
generous direction” and the “spirited cast” kept the scenes “crackling with
physical business and roiling humor,” and the “surprisingly slender” plot “for
such an over-populated work . . . unspools engagingly, and Butterworth’s language
is rich with bravado, rough-hewn lyricism and profane musicality.” Then Cote asks: “So what’s the problem?” And
responds: “There are a couple.”
First is that despite the
ensemble’s fine work, one can’t shake the feeling that this is an elaborate
pile of Stage Irish clichés. The whiskey
flows, rainbows are spotted, tall tales are told and there’s a frickin’ Riverdance sequence
during the dinner party. . . . Butterworth . . . seems a bit too fond of the
Celtic ready-mades. It’s a fine line
between myth and minstrelsy, a border the play doesn’t always tread so nimbly. .
. .
The second issue is one of
inertia. It’s clear that Butterworth has
architected the play on three levels—domestic, national and mythic—but it
doesn’t resonate equally strongly on all three, and in fact, falls flat on the
second two. . . . [D]espite a warm and charismatic turn by Considine, Quinn is
not developed or active enough to anchor the strands of the play in a
persuasive reality—psychological or pulp. Aunt Pat, with her toxic worship of the IRA,
is a more exciting figure than practically anyone onstage. Caitlin’s resurgent grief is briefly gripping,
and the lurking IRA goons provide noirish frisson, but three hours pass, and it
feels like wind-up. Which makes the
bloodletting in the final minutes seem like a tacked-on, unearned bid for Greek
tragedy. All plays are contrived, but
the good ones disguise their contrivances, not revealing seams and joints every
five minutes.
Alluding to the harvest feast in the middle of the play,
Cote concluded, “For those who find The Ferryman a pure
theatrical joy with no reservations, it’s a party they will happily attend. But some of us linger in the doorway, unable
to join.”
Sara Holdren of New
York magazine/Vulture, labeling The Ferryman a “boisterous behemoth of a
new play,” proclaims at the outset of her review—another of the mid-rated
notices on Show-Score at 65—“We might
as well start with the goose.” This is
because the actualities of life—the live goose, the live rabbits, and the real
baby—“give us the pleasurable shock of the real, the unfakeable, in a
necessarily artificial world, and they go a long way towards convincing us of
that world’s essential, if not literal, reality—of its gritty, fleshy, tangible
truthiness.” Holdren advised, “You can
practically smell the dopamine gushing through the theater. Our brains, our bodies, are being
irrepressibly triggered and we love it.”
We’re “done for,” she declared.
Then she backed off, observing that “the farther you get away from The
Ferryman, the more the rush starts to subside, and the more the play’s
emotional mechanics are exposed.” Holdren
found the play “a frankly fascinating mixture of prodigious craftsmanship and
brazen cultural and dramatic cliché. It
pushes every high-drama button and checks every shamrock-shaped box”; the
reviewer from New York acknowledged
that “Butterworth’s writerly skill—his sense for build and climax and his
raconteur’s gift for abundant, colorful language—is almost enough to dazzle us
into submission. Almost.”
With a cast of “of uniformly fantastic actors,” Holdren
found:
The Ferryman contains
many genuinely exhilarating moments, [but] the show itself is like an enormous
version of that goose: It works on you, and eventually you
start to realize how it’s working on you, the levers it’s
pulling, the pleasure centers it’s poking. And its Irishness—which walks a knife-edge between
robust authenticity and lyrical exaggeration—starts to slip towards blarney.
The New York
magazine writer felt:
The play is awash in romantic motifs
played at maximum volume—the lush mysticism and winking ribaldry, the ghost
stories and glamor and earthy wisdom, the colorful cursing and constant
drinking (both given increased hilarity when performed, as they frequently are,
by the kids), the wild bursts of step dancing, brought up short by the solemn
singing of “Erin go Bragh” in honor of those fallen for the cause of freedom.
And she confessed, “And we feel all of it:
This stuff, especially to certain sensibilities, is catnip.” Holdren
gives credit to “the masterful ensemble,” working with “Butterworth’s
undeniably juicy text,” for keeping the clichés and stereotypes on the
down-low, papering over the “cleverly built gimmickry” that would be more
visible “[i]n the hands of lesser actors.”
As for the directing, the New York review-writer found that “Mendes treats the play like one
of his James Bond movies [he also directed 2012’s Skyfall]: The emotional register gets overblown, as if underscored
with dark violins. The director is also
more cinematic than theatrical in his handling of The Ferryman’s dramatic flow.”
She felt that “Butterworth’s three acts get progressively more
overwrought, more dependent on trope, contrivance, and symbolism.” Holdren concluded: “The devil of it all is
that . . ., both despite and because of its flagrant use of
formula, The Ferryman hooks us by the gills and pulls us
along.”
In the New Yorker,
Vinson Cunningham declared that, “[b]ecause
of its length . . . the play feels epic, but the actual plot is fairly simple.”
The “art” of the play, said Cunningham,
“is in how the everyday turns sinister.”
The New Yorker reviewer
concluded: “Death and politics are always coming for you, Butterworth’s play
seems to say. Neither ever quits or
seems to lose once its mind is set. Don’t
ignore them, but, otherwise, what can you do? In the meantime, talk and laugh, love and
wait.”
In another 95-scored notice, Adam Feldman of Time Out New York described The Ferryman as
“a tremendously noisy play about silence and its price.” With all the activity on stage and the huge
cast, Feldman found, “The whole thrilling production seems alive, as few
Broadway shows do, with the clutter and scope of reality.” The reviewer explained, “At once a romance, a
thriller and a multigenrational family drama, The Ferryman is
also more than those things” as “the action has overtones of larger stories.”
Despite its length, the man from TONY
affirmed, “The Ferryman never drags, in part because Butterworth
continually shifts and expands the play’s focus to what had seemed like side
characters.” Feldman concluded, “The
Ferryman is a seismic experience at the theater: As it spins forward,
its plates keep shifting under it. You
sense the rumbles and you feel the shaking—the shaking might be you—as you wait
for this magnificent and harrowing play to crack open.”
Entertainment Weekly’s
Marc Snetiker, calling the play a “family thriller” with an “armrest-grabber of
an ending,” asserted that it “grips you” as it “bounces off the walls of” the
Carney farmhouse “that’s equally mammoth and claustrophobic.” Once inside the house, Snetiker found that “you
find yourself quickly swept up in the action of a clan of endlessly busy
farmers and daughters, of characters drawn remarkably quickly and confidently.” He added that “if you find that the legend of
this family builds in your heart and mind in equal parts with the dread of some
unspoken but surely forthcoming haunting, then consider that a credit to
Butterworth’s text in the hands of director Sam Mendes.” The EW
reviewer described the play as a “pyramid of a thriller” and reported that
Mendes “stages it with violent tension—the great curiosity being that two of
the play’s three acts have no right to be so damn enthralling.” Snetiker felt, however, that, “more than
halfway in, it’s not quite clear why or how the stakes became so exorbitantly
high.” He advised that, “with all the
tension, it’s almost better to think of The Ferryman without
thinking too much about it. It’s easy to
find yourself overly occupied with where it’s going than where you’ve just been.” The review-writer felt, “This is a kitchen
drama that only double-faces into a thriller, and it’s a thumping good one—a
well-built, well-executed, heaping helping of kinetic suspense that departs
from genre convention.” In the end,
Snetiker warned that “audiences should be prepared for a genre-bender that
demands they do the same.”
In Variety,
Marilyn Stasio proclaimed, “Glorious is not too strong a word for
director Sam Mendes’s production of Jez Butterworth’s heartbreaker of
a play.” Stasio continued, “Flawless
ensemble work by a large and splendid cast adds depth to the characters in this
sprawling drama that is at once a domestic calamity and a political tragedy.” The Variety
reviewer observed, “The domestic dramas in this household are as primal as
those in any Greek tragedy, if not as classically restrained.” There’s always music of one kind or another
in the Carney house, but Stasio observed that “we must add the music of
Butterworth’s own prose, sweet as springtime, lush as summer, bittersweet as
autumn, deathly as winter.”
David Rooney’s “Bottom Line” in the Hollywood Reporter was “Supremely confident storytelling,” and he
labeled The Ferryman a “gloriously
entertaining” new play and a “crackling thriller woven into the vibrant canvas
of a character-driven portrait of big-family rural communion.” The
Ferryman, said Rooney in a review that also scored a 95 on Show-Score, “positively thrums with life
and love” in Mendes’s “vigorously inhabited production.” He described it
as “a mighty play full of magic and poetry—of passionate people forged out of
conflicts that rise up from history to shatter the idylls of the present.” But Rooney added that “it's also a work
almost bursting with joy and celebration, with dance and song exploding out of
fierce cultural identity, and with rambunctious humor and eccentricity.” With special mention for Donnelly and
Considine for “powerful feeling,” the HR
reviewer proclaimed the large “ensemble is a seamless unit.” Mendes’s “astute direction” is “equally
attuned to individual nuances and to the collective dynamism of this rowdy,
noisy assembly.” Rooney called the play
“a unique experience—hilarious, shattering, alive visually, intellectually and
emotionally, even sensory in its heightened rustic naturalism” and added that “the
language is sheer music, even when laced with the most obscure Irish
vernacular. This is rich, full-throated theater not to be missed.”
Roma Torre’s NY1 review, another 95, part of which I’ve
already quoted above, situated the play within “the great Irish tradition of
vivid story-telling” and also added, “At 3 hours and 15 minutes, the heavily
plotted saga may seem long, but . . . the story is so engrossing, the
characters so engaging, and the suspense so foreboding, you’ll be left wanting
more.” The production is “helmed
brilliantly” Mendes and “unfolds like a beloved novel, introducing lots of
curious threads that eventually tie together in a giant climactic knot.” Torre affirmed that “each member of this
splendid ensemble delivers finely crafted performances,” making special mention
of the little girls, Flanagan’s Aunt Maggie, Molloy’s Aunt Pat, and Edward’s
Tom Kettle. The NY1 reviewer reserved
special praise for Donnelly and Considine for their “tremendous emotional range.” She concluded: “Watching the play, you may be
reminded of other great works, from ‘August Osage’s’ animated family to ‘The
Crucible’s’ moral conundrum and even a little ‘Of Mice and Men’ but ‘The
Ferryman’ stands out as a classic all on its own!”
On WNYC, the National Public Radio outlet in New York City, Jennifer
Vanasco characterized Butterworth’s “new family drama is an explosive,
immersive experience that manages to be both mythic in scope and yet completely
grounded in the everyday.” The WNYC
reviewer pointed out that “Mendes creates an almost cinematic realism here.” The script, said Vanasco, is “a finely crafted
piece of writing that sets up every small turn in the plot, and an
extraordinarily well-realized production that uses sharp observations to make
this family, the Carneys, feel like they are people you know as well as you
know your own family.” The NPR reviewer
described The Ferryman as “a
thriller, kind of, and though it can teeter on the edge of melodrama, the play
is also a meditation on longing for something—a way of life, a person—that’s
disappeared or is about to.” Dismissing
concerns about the play’s length, Vanasco proclaimed, “This production is
extraordinary—don’t miss it.”
Joel Benjamin of NewYorkTheaterScene.net
declared at the top of his 97-rated review, “Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman is
not a play. It is an experience, a rare
experience whose aftermath will linger for days, if not weeks, in the minds of
those who see it.” He added that the
playwright “brilliantly relates the tension, violence and dread that rocked
Ireland” during the Troubles . . . , incisively using this domestic microcosm
to illuminate the complexities of a society at war with itself.” Benjamin found, “Under Sam Mendes’ expert
direction, all [the] characters and all the disparate activities flow smoothly
until a tragically violent ending that takes everyone by surprise.”
On TheaterMania, David
Gordon reported that The Ferryman “is
certainly epic . . . and obviously sprawling, hypnotizing us over the course of
three acts. But those words really only
skim the surface of this undeniably thrilling theatrical experience, so here
are some better ones: ‘compelling,’ ‘heartbreaking,’ and just ‘bloody good.’” In yet another review that received a score
of 95, Gordon describes The Ferryman
as “a pressure cooker of a play” and found it “[c]unningly directed by Sam
Mendes as a thriller disguised as a melodrama.”
As to the cast, Gordon found, “Every
single performance is distinct and brimming with personality,” especially “the
two slow-boiling performances at the center,” Considine and Donnelly. In his final statement, the TM reviewer asserted, “It’s undeniable
how enthralling The Ferryman is, and
a second viewing only reinforces its thematic richness. No matter what adjectives or verbs you use to
describe it, only one sentence really suffices: The Ferryman is the best play running on Broadway.”
Calling the play “gloriously hyperkinetic” in his 95-rated
notice, Talkin’ Broadway’s Howard
Miller reported that it “embraces comedy, drama, and melodrama in equal measure
as it depicts both an intimate family saga and an expansive examination of the
devastating impact of the entrenched “Troubles” of Northern Ireland.” The
Ferryman “is richly imagined, smartly directed by Sam Mendes, and
smashingly performed.” The TB review-writer affirmed that
Butterworth “has outdone himself here”; calling him a “wordsmith,” Miller
observed that “you can see how he draws inspiration from the likes of
Shakespeare and Virgil, Sean O'Casey, Conor McPherson and Eugene O'Neill. Yet he makes it all his own.” The reviewer concluded, “Thanks to all
involved, . . . The Ferryman is an
absolutely sensational theatrical experience.”
In one of two reviews, this one receiving a score of 100, Steven
Suskin proclaimed on New York Stage
Review, “It is audacious to anoint Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman the
best play of the century, as we are not quite 19 percent of the way through.
Even so, The Ferryman is the best play of the century thus
far, setting a high mark to match.”
Suskin added, “Not since Angels in America: Millennium
Approaches first appeared in 1992 has a new play been so thrillingly,
enthrallingly breathtaking.” The large
cast is “superb,” all “giving assured performances”; “Mendes has pulled
marvelous performances from them all.”
Despite its length, Suskin found the script most impressive: there’s “never
a line or word that doesn’t contribute to the whole.” The review-writer asserted, “Nothing is
wasted, everything is fundamental, and the evening flies by so swiftly that you
don’t realize you’ve been sitting there a tad over three hours. It’s hard to be restless when you’re
breathlessly engaged.” Suskin concluded,
“Butterworth’s The Ferryman, from start to finish, is a masterwork,”
and advised readers, “Here’s your chance to see a new, instant and monumental
classic fresh off the author’s computer screen.”
In the other NYSR
notice, this one rating only a 95, Melissa Rose Bernardo remarked, “It’s
virtually impossible to describe The Ferryman without using
the word epic.” She also
declared it “undeniably Butterworth’s best play,” which she labeled “a
wrenching family drama.” Bernardo warned
her audience that “you’ll find yourself on the edge of your seat during even
the most sedate scenes.” In her
summation, the second NYSR writer
observed, “It’s not a spoiler to say that The Ferryman ends
tragically—as so many epics do. But it
ends so ferociously, in such a glorious burst of action, predictions, and
promises, that a follow-up would not be unwelcome. After more than three hours, it feels
like The Ferryman has just begun.”
On Broadway World,
Michael Dale assured potential theatergoers that despite The Ferryman’s length, “the play flies by,” and that under
Mendes’s “empathetic direction, the wonderful ensemble company provides
deeply-textured and entertaining performances.”
Not having liked Butterworth’s The
River or Jerusalem, Dale reported
that The Ferryman “is a completely
different kind of drama and its combination of warmth, romance, humor and
intrigue is totally engaging.”
JK Clarke dubbed The
Ferryman “compelling” drama on Theater
Pizzazz, with “terrific performances” from the large cast. Clarke observed, “The Ferryman’s three
plus hours fly by because of so much to see, hear and devour leaving no down
time for the audience.” With the crowded
and busy stage, the TP reviewer
asserted, “there’s always something occupying the eye and ear.” In his final analysis, Clarke stated, “Despite
many of the portrayals of the Carney family being clichéd and possibly
offensive stereotypes, they represent, even in the midst of tragic and troubled
times, a celebration of the love, humor and unity of an Irish family. And it is a joy to witness.”
Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp,
virtually echoing TheaterMania’s
David Gordon, asserted, “If ever the word ‘epic’ is fitting rather than an
over-used cliché, Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman is it.” Dubbing the play a “saga,” Sommer
nevertheless found that “the interactions between all [the] characters, in and
out of the spacious family room and kitchen and up and down a sky high
stairway, dish up plenty of Irish story-telling clichés,” listing the same
elements of The Ferryman cited by
many of her colleagues. She added that “the
plot’s political thriller aspects become increasingly melodramatic.” Still, the CU review-writer noted that the play “is so filled with rich
dialogue and well defined, marvelously portrayed characters that, even when
they lean towards the stereotypical and clichéd, their words and actions manage
to feel integral and, yes, necessary.”
She continued: “As for the menacing political situation, its veering
towards melodrama makes for a finale that’s as inevitable as it is
gut-wrenchingly stunning.” Sommer found,
“The writing, direction, performances and top drawer design work bring out the
full flavor of this multi-generation filled home.” In her conclusion,
Sommer acknowledged, I’ll admit I could have done with a few less songs and
somewhat shorter monologues from the uncle and aunts, but given that this is
such a well conceived and executed theatrical package, the more than three
hours I spent at the Bernard [B] Jacobs Theatre passed a lot faster and more
enjoyably than a lot of 90-minute shows I’ve seen.”
City Cabaret, the
site that scored a 99 for the review of Elizabeth Ahlfors, labeled The Ferryman “exemplary,” “a personal
generational play, lavish with emotion, laughs, tears, and especially secrets.” Ahlfors called the play “a rambling Irish
tale . . . with lots of links to classical theater and literature.” Ahlfors felt that even in the large cast, “each
character is expressive, with intriguing connections.” In her judgment, “The Ferryman ran
for three years in London, winning major reviews. It can do no less here.”
On the Daily Beast,
Tim Teeman unabashedly proclaimed:
To be clear: Jez
Butterworth’s The Ferryman is a rollicking, moving, enveloping
masterpiece, an emphatic herald of the strength and power of original
playwriting on Broadway. It is
deserving of every single award it won in London prior to coming to New York,
and every award it should deservedly win while it is [here].
It’s easy to see how it earned a score of 100 from Show-Score, but Teeman continued: “Do
whatever you can to see it; much-loved relations, prepare to be sold. Rarely is theater so beautifully written,
brilliantly acted and directed, and impressively mounted.” Just to be sure we “[g]et the message,” the DB writer pointed out: “The Ferryman is
a feast of dramatic forms and shapes, containing song, dance, plot, vivid
action, thrilling speech, violence, poetry. It is earthy, real, brutal, and it is airy,
sometimes abstract, flirting with metaphor, myth, and symbols.” Teeman found the play “rich, and so full of
textured, watchable characters telling stories of modern times and times of
yore, that one leaves the play wishing either to watch hours more of it or hope
it births a sequel and movie.” The DB reviewer, referring to the Sean
O’Hagan article in the Guardian,
closed his revuew by remarking:
The characters read as characters,
not as stereotypes, their “Irishness” not reduced to a set of hoary cultural
markers. One wants to know the
characters more at the end; indeed, we have barely begun to know them. What one does know of them invites further
intimacy and inquiry.
Jonathan Mandell characterized The Ferryman as “rich, sweeping entertainment—epic, tragic . . . and
cinematic” on New York Theater. He explained “cinematic” by pointing out that
“‘The Ferryman’ comes closer to a movie than to most plays these days in
several ways: Its scale—there are some two dozen actors, all terrific,
most making their Broadway debuts; its embrace of naturalism—there’s a live
baby, a bunny, and a goose!—and simultaneously of myth; its willingness to mine
archetypes, and its bold use of familiar storylines from crowd-pleasing genres.” Mandell also asserted, “A significant joy of ‘The
Ferryman’ is sharing in the characters’ excitement, dancing, singing, joking
and general hubbub during the Harvest and the Harvest Feast that follows.” The NY
Theater blogger further observed that the many “plotlines give ‘The Ferryman’
forward thrust. But the many
characters and their stories give it beauty.”
In his final analysis, Mandell deemed The Ferryman “the most thrilling play of the Broadway season.”
In the lowest-rated review on Show-Score (35), Cahir O’Doherty wrote on IrishCentral “that Jez Butterworth’s play is about as subtle as a
brick hurled through an Orange Hall window.” (“Orange Hall” is a reference to the
meeting lodges of the Loyal Orange Institution, more commonly known as the
Orange Order, a Protestant fraternal order in Northern Ireland with strong
anti-Catholicism policies and devoted to the British crown.) O’Doherty continued, “It doesn’t matter that
it’s not really an Irish play in any sense at all, but rather a sort of late
Shakespearean comedy festooned with vaguely Irish avatars superimposed over an
arrestingly weird mashup of influences that include Cold Comfort Farm, The
Brady Bunch and High Noon.” After
dismissing several of the characters (not the actors, mind you) as incredible
or clichéd, the IC reviewer added, “The
plot of The Ferryman is on its face ridiculous. . . . It’s simply a contrivance to drive the
engine, power the play.”
“So many scenes rankled me or made me scoff.” The writer recounted that he was a teen
himself at the time the play is set; he remembers, “Back then, people weren’t
celebrating big bountiful autumn harvests with rustic Arcadian dances and giant
family feasts. More often they were
reeling from seeing the land they loved turned into a slaughterhouse. It was a
depressing time.” Furthermore, O’Doherty
recalled, “There really wasn’t a lot of golden world country dancing going on. Strangely enough, we weren’t in the mood.” All told, the review-writer summed up:
What’s disorienting about The
Ferryman is that real life keeps breaking through its idyllic forest of Arden
set up, but each time it does we even have a melancholy Jaques figure to pull a
rabbit from his pockets or quote Virgil, tearing at the fabric of what is real
with whimsical theatrical fancy.
O’Doherty’s overall complaint about The Ferryman was as follows:
If there’s one place in the
English-speaking world that Americans know less about than even the English, it’s
Ireland. To the average American we’re a
sort of unstable mash-up of castles and fairies and sad ghosts and Guinness; in
England, we’re often just the small, sad field between them and the Atlantic. Both of these outlooks are problematic.
His final word on the play was: “The Ferryman means well and
it often plays well. But it simply isn’t
us.”
Tulis McCall of New
York Theater Guide called The
Ferryman a “brilliant production” and pronounced, “This is not so much a
play as it is a communal aria. The
writing is choral. The characters move
in and out like wild folk dancers slipping in and out of the light.” McCall reported, “Each of the performances is
crafted to perfection, and Sam Mendes' direction insures that everyone has
their spotlight.” As for the script, “Jez
Butterworth knits characters into characters, then into stories, then into
layers of overlapping colors, then into worlds that are larger than the stage
that holds them.” By the end, the NYTG reviewer felt, “The story has woven
you into its web without your knowing it.
The result is that, when this play is over, you wish it were not.”
[Several mentions of Tracy Letts’s family play, August: Osage County, which ran on Broadway from 2007 to 2009, were made by reviewers of The Ferryman. I not only saw that production, but it was one of the first plays on which I reported on Rick On Theater. Interested readers who want to check out what the cross-references mean are encouraged to check back to my report on 30 June 2009 (https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2009/06/august-osage-county.html).]
