Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed struggle for a farming career and now lives with his sick wife, their countless kids, his sister-in-law and her only son. But the IRA, who murdered his brother as punishment for his disloyalty, are due to pay a visit with unknown intentions. More violence, perhaps? Protection money? Or both. Well, neither, it turns out. They merely want Quinn to refrain from blaming his brother’s death on them. Rather a low price to ask. And yet Quinn is willing to defy them even though he knows they repay disobedience with murder, and he now has a dozen vulnerable dependents to protect.
These plot elements don’t quite stack up. And the tone is more sentimental than in Butterworth’s hit play Jerusalem, which was crammed with hilarious comedy. Here the idiom is honey-glazed rural whimsy. Adorable kiddiwinks tumble around the kitchen pestering their elders for tales from the old days. Everyone takes a wee glug of Bushmills for breakfast and improvises an award-winning display of Irish dancing. An amiable bumpkin lurches in and gives the kids ripe apples and a live rabbit. Later he reappears with an escaped goose. After being throttled off-stage, the bird is hung upside-down next to the window, whose soft lighting transforms it, rather obviously, into an emblem of innocent sacrifice.
The play feels like a three-hour episode of The Waltons haunted by the shadow of The Godfather. Butterworth’s dialect sounds convincing but his grasp of Catholic morality is less sure. An ageing aunt relates a youthful tryst as follows: ‘I swear to Christ I could have ridden that boy from here to Connemara and back.’
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