The essential threads are: Caitlin (a fully-committed Laura Donnelly), wife of dead man in bog, has been staying under Quinn’s roof these past ten years. Muldoon ends the scene by growling, “Why don’t you tell me everything you know about Quinn Carney?” Then the wall rises up and the remainder of the play takes place on Quinn’s farm, although it might have been nice to stay in the previous scene a bit longer to hear some of what the priest had to say, because it takes considerable time to piece it all together. In the prologue, there’s an early encounter between the IRA boss, named Muldoon (played with resonant and melodious base notes by Stuart Graham), and Quinn’s priest.
At the first intermission, a woman behind me asked “Did you understand anything that just happened?”Ī dead man is discovered in a bog with a bullet through his head – the body had been there ten years, and is identified as the younger brother of one Quinn Carney (a confident and appealing Paddy Considine), who is now a farmer in Northern Ireland. As technique, this falls on the withholding side (along with other dramatic devices deployed throughout that I would describe as effective yet agitating – they work, but are still rather uncomfortable hooks to swallow). Presented in three hour-long scenes (plus a prologue at the top of show), Butterworth opens with a rather murky first act, made up of intentionally disparate narrative strands of something yet to come together. But the thing about a knot is that you’ve got to be careful not to leave loose ends to tug at, lest the whole thing unravel.
Like one of those Celtic knots, Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, a story about a family in Northern Ireland set in 1981 amid the heyday of IRA menace, wills and weaves itself into focus right in front of you. A family in turmoil in The Ferryman (Photo: Joan Marcus)