THE WEIR. To 22 November.
Bolton
THE WEIR
by Conor McPherson
Octagon Theatre To 22 November 2003
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 8,12,15 November 2pm
Audio-described 19 November
BSL Signed 14 November
Runs 1hr 55min No interval
TICKETS: 01204 520661
www.octagonbolton.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 8 November
Conor McPherson's play is all talk and the Octagon's production strong enough to show that's all that's needed.
Strange stories in a setting where one character's a stranger, another almost become one. Conor McPherson's ghost stories round the bar had an apt setting for its London premiere at one of the Royal Court's temporary West End venues an under-stage, where you could imagine the dark, featureless walls of Brendan's bar gave on to a dark hillside. Spooky place; spooky tales.
Though, of course, most of the men are just out for a normal night's drink and chat. Valerie's moving to the area, she's just arrived, making initial social contact. Everyone's being very polite. Nothing untoward happens in fact, it was crafty of Northampton's Royal Theatre last spring to team this play with Waiting For Godot, for both rely on Irish voices speaking and nothing much happening. Once, or twice.
In Bolton, Mark Babych moves away from this folk-takes on the window-ledge approach. Abetted by the tatty chain-pub neon-hell of Patrick Connellan's bar-set, the Octagon's production is often a character comedy. Physically, it's the non-regulars who are the slighter figures. Joanna Mitchell's Valerie is all polite excuses at causing any inconvenience, while showing up the limited routine of the men's lives - go-nowhere livelihoods relaxing in a pub without wine where the women's lavatory's not due for repair till the forthcoming annual influx of German visitors.
Michael O' Connor takes the joshing in good part; Finbar's had the temerity to get out and get rich. He's loomed over by taller, broader figures who neither mean nor can cause harm. Instead, there emerges from them a series of spooky tales with local settings. No-one gives any idea of trying to cause terror through these, trying, rather like children with adult gravity, simply to impress.
The play's quiet irony is that they end up impressed and moved by Valerie's story, human tragedy taking the emphasis from ghostly apparatus, though still with its unnerving edge. The regulars' quiet dispersal makes the point in a soundly acted production which steadily builds and shifts the mood from humour through the casually mentioned photograph of the Weir which begins the shift in talk towards the supernatural to eventual sombreness.
Jack: Peter Dineen
Brendan: Kieran Lagan
Valerie: Joanne Mitchell
Jim: Dan Mullane
Finbar: Michael O' Connor
Director: Mark Babych
Designer: Patrick Connellan
Lighting: Thomas Weir
Sound: Andy Smith
Voice Dialect Coach: Majella Hurley
2003-11-13 12:59:39