Making his brilliant National Theatre debut as author and director, Conor McPherson’s new play powerfully recalls Pinter’s The Homecoming with its grim all-male household dominated by a stick-wielding bully in an armchair.
In this case the home-comer is Karl Johnson’s Sharky, a wiry, nervous sometime fisherman and chauffeur, returning to Dublin to look after his older brother Richard, suddenly blinded when he tumbled into a skip while celebrating Halloween.
An incorrigible roaring drunk with a cruel streak, Jim Norton’s Richard is forever reaching for the next glass, aided and abetted by his two drinking companions: Conleth Hill’s locked-out husband Ivan, and Michael McElhatton’s cocksure Nicky, who has not only cuckolded Sharky, but even commandeered his car.
On Christmas Eve, into this sad, seedy world of booze and boasting, steps the very devil in the shape of Ron Cook’s dapper Mr Lockhart, a figure straight out of the mythic past of Dublin’s Hellfire Club, come to collect Sharky’s soul with a return game of poker, and a trip to Hell by way of the Hole in the Wall, a witty dual allusion to the cashpoint machine down the road.
Anecdotes colour the events of a day and night and there is a reminder of McPherson’s talent for monologue, with Lockhart’s sustained description of Hell as a chilly, deathless demise. But the devil is also in the inventive directorial detail, from a recalcitrant lavatory cistern, and a bottle of Irish constantly hovering above empty glasses, to something as simple as a comic struggle with a rubber glove.
The sheer skill of the piece is also in the way that something as simple as a mislaid pair of glasses is gently woven into a marvellously satisfying trick ending, that splendidly turns the tables on the all-night poker session and its eventual outcome.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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