Emily Berry
posted 26 October 2006

There's something unfailingly profound about well-written lines delivered by drunk Irishmen, and Conor McPherson seems to have cornered this market rather successfully. Not all plays which are good are well-written, but McPherson has a way of finding the darkness in language and bringing it to light without ever making a fuss about it. The Seafarer is a brief, almost humble play about the infinitesimal distance between ordinary life and the abyss, in which a drunken card game nearly ends in eternal damnation - but doesn't.

It's Christmas Eve and Ivan (Conleth Hill) is still drunk from the night before, having somehow ended up at Richard's house. Richard (Jim Norton) is blind and getting on a bit - he lost his sight, he reveals, by falling into a skip on Halloween. He too has a fondness for the bottle. Still, he's a cheery fellow, unlike his world-weary brother Sharky (Karl Johnson), who is on hand to cook his meals and flush the toilet for him. Sharky is unfortunately almost too taciturn, leaving his character seeming rather underdeveloped. The action takes place in their front room, a detailed interior in shades of brown and red, cosily lit, with a steep flight of stairs which seems to have no purpose other than as the site of various tumblings.

The endless quest for drink and subsequent drunken mishaps or tales thereof keep the audience chuckling in the first half, but it's the second which is really the heart of the play. The introduction of the naïve and equally sozzled Nicky (Michael McElhatton) and his disquieting companion, Mr Lockhart (Ron Cook) gets things moving, when it becomes clear that Mr Lockhart isn't quite who he appears to be. In fact, he's the Devil. There follows a card game in which the stakes are higher than most of them realise. The Seafarer stands on the strength of the writing and the quality of the acting, which are excellent. Norton's Richard, a kind of contemporary Tiresias, sensing in his waters the outcome of the card game, is particularly accomplished. There is a very memorable speech in which he describes having dreamt he could see, came face to face with a bluebottle, 'the most intricate and tiny of God's creations', and woke up with the belief that if God is in any of us, 'God is in the fly'. 'How do you account for the fly's taste for shit then?' Lockhart responds bitterly.

What these hopeless drunks have to recommend them to him upstairs isn't entirely clear, but neither do they seem entirely deserving of the picture of terrible pain and isolation, a coffin a thousand leagues under the sea, that Mr Lockhart relates when describing Hell to his intended victim. If, as it seems, the central feature of damnation is to be utterly unloved, then this, surprisingly, is a play about the redemptive power of love, that even these rough, damaged men have enough affection between them to keep the Devil at bay.

Till 11 January 2007