Night of the Irish undead

>> Plotless, directionless Weir flounders at Centaur

by AMY BARRATT

Currently on display at the Centaur zoo: fuzzy adorable Irishmen! If last year's production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane shattered illusions of Ireland as a pastoral landscape filled with leprechaun-jolly folk, The Weir, this season's Irish offering, attempts, misguidedly, to reinstate them.

The Weir, despite winning numerous awards including an Olivier (London) for Best Play and a New York Critics' Circle Award, is not the tightest drum in the parade. Playwright Conor McPherson started out writing one-person vehicles and even here, where he has five characters on stage, he's basically given us a series of monologues with bits of dialogue to hold them together. The play may have its own subtle rhythms and unconventional form, but we don't feel them in this production directed by Centaur artistic director Gordon McCall.

John Dinning's set lovingly recreates the warm, woody atmosphere of a rural Irish pub. You can almost smell the sod burning in the pot-bellied stove as the local characters toddle in to share a pint and a yarn on a windy Sligo night. The design does exactly what it should: it lulls us into a false sense of security. Unfortunately, the production never shakes us out of it.

The plot, such as it is, has a Dublin woman who has just moved into the area coming into the pub with Finbar (Rob MacLean), a local lad who has made good in the city and returned to buy up half the town. There is much consternation among the men in the place since Finbar has a wife. Jack (Wayne Burnett), in his 50s, and Jim (Daniel Lillford), in his 40s, have neither left nor married nor made anything of themselves in any way. Brendan (Matthew Gibson), the barkeep, is younger but also unmarried.

In the absence of plot, this play needs to emphasize the relationships between these four men, rooted in the experiences of a lifetime or, more likely, passed down from father to son for generations. It should be about what they've done or failed to do with their lives and what grudges each holds against the others. And it ought to be about the impure thoughts all four are having about Valerie, but somehow this production manages to squelch any sexual tension too, in the interests, no doubt, of keeping the Irish unthreatening and pixie-like.

Despite the misreading of the text, this production might almost have been saved if some of the actors possessed the stereotypical Irish gift of gab. But even the ringer brought in from Dublin to play the sole female role, Ingrid Craigie, is a barely adequate spinner of yarns. She, and all of them, are constrained by hopeless blocking and a lighting design so discrete as to be invisible to the naked eye. This Weir is the theatrical equivalent of a zombie: a soulless, wandering, undead thing.

Get In On It

English theatre continues to thrive in the strangest places: Daniel MacIvor and his friends from Da Da Camera, are at Usine C this week with their latest paranoid offering: In On It, starring MacIvor and Darren O'Donnell, is about a guy named Ray whose wife leaves him just as he's discovering he has an incurable illness. But it's also about two actors, who are former lovers, portraying Ray's story. All very po-mo.

Weir runs to April 1 at the Centaur, $20-36, 288-3161. In On It runs to March 3 at Usine C, $18-25, 521-4493