Re-opened in 1992. Seats 254. 1999 - Ambassador Theatre Group takes over from the Associated Capital Theatres as the landlord of the Donmar Warehouse. 2002 - Michael Grandage succeeds Sam Mendes as Artistic Director of the Donmar. Nick Frankfort succeeds Caro Newling as Executive Producer.
Set in a bar in a remote part of Ireland, the local lads are swapping spooky stories to impress an attractive young woman, Valerie, recently arrived from Dublin. What begins as a simple visit to the local pub soon turns out to be an evening of both funny and spellbinding stories, until the final tale takes a strange and unexpected twist...Hailed as the best new play of the nineties, when The Weir premiered at the Ambassadors Theatre, London in 1997, it won McPherson the Evening Standard ‘Most Promising Playwright Award, and in 1999 it won the prestigious Olivier Award for ‘Best New Play.
Rourke is taking on board the first major British revival of this traditional play, so make sure you book your tickets to ensure you do not miss out.
The play, set in an rural Irish pub, follows a number of stories told by male attendents to impress a female stranger; these tales quickly reveal the dark past and present lives of the drinkers, that ultimatlely result in immediate and disturbing revelations.
… Josie Rourke's keenly edged revival... The tone is set from the minute that magnificent, craggy, great big jowly sack of a man, Brian Cox, zips up his trousers… helped out by Ardal O'Hanlon's quietly grinning mother's boy… Their host is resigned barman Brendan, whom Peter McDonald plays with a lesser degree of consoling steadiness than did Brendan Coyle… It's this peculiar Irish balancing act between breath-taking oddity and numbing normality that makes The Weir - a modern classic, that's for sure - so utterly absorbing and beguiling. For this is an enclosed world, beautifully rendered by Rourke and her cast on Tom Scutt's brown and battered old saloon bar…
Libby Purves The Times ★★★★
… this marvellous play made Conor McPherson’s name… Josie Rourke’s casting is perfect... Valerie is Dervla Kirwan, with her beautiful broad-browed Madonna face and capacity to transcend ordinariness… McPherson’s comic gift for bathos is never cheap, but serves the absurd truth that, without scorn or denial, the worst things sometimes briefly become jokes… a particular description of a barman making a sandwich long ago becomes one of the most cathartic moments in theatre… I have known this, in a similar grief and a not dissimilar Irish bar. It was almost shocking to have it reproduced truthfully and beautifully in a London theatre.
Why, 16 years after its premiere, does Conor McPherson's play still grip us?… McPherson also has the priceless ability to invest a tiny phrase with rich meaning… Josie Rourke brings out especially well is the sense of a nightly, blokeish ritual... Brian Cox is magnificent as the cantankerous Jack... But there is wonderful work all round from Risteárd Cooper as the local landowner who now seeks to appropriate Valerie, Ardal O'Hanlon as a mother-dominated odd-job man, Peter McDonald as the quiet barman and Dervla Kirwan, whose Valerie, for all her buried sadness, is prone to fits of giggles. It's a revival that confirms The Weir's status as a contemporary classic.
...The Weirseems to grow richer with age, as is demonstrated now by Josie Rourke's beautifully acted revival at the Donmar Warehouse – a production which is glowing infused with McPherson's creative magnanimity… Brian Cox was a wonder in this latter role… Peter McDonald's excellent Brendan… Ardal O'Hanlon's kindly, dim Jim… and Risteard Cooper's flash, linen-suited Finbar… Dervla Kirwan superbly captures both Valerie's nervous desire to be convivial and the white-faced indescribable grief... truly haunting nonetheless – as this deeply humane play.
I have no doubt that The Weiris a modern classic… Josie Rourke directs a pitch-perfect production that does full justice to both the humour and the depth of this wonderful play… beautifully evoked in Tom Scutt’s design. Brian Cox… is superb as Jack… Dervla Kirwan is deeply moving… There is lovely support too from Ardal O’Hanlon as the painfully shy Jim, Peter McDonald as the likeable barman and Risteard as the flashy Finbar… The Weirwill be followed at the Donmar by the premiere of McPherson’s new play, The Night Alive, directed by the writer. Will theatrical lightning strike twice in the same place? I can hardly wait to find out.
…This intimate revival is full of lovingly detailed performances, which reveal this deceptively simple 100-minute piece's ample dimensions… an excellent design by Tom Scutt… The superb Brian Cox is Jack... And Risteárd Cooper brings geniality and mischief to Finbar… Dervla Kirwan’s Valerie laps up their anecdotes… Kirwan’s performance is unaffected and quietly charming. Her naturalness is the heart of this authentic, elegiac production… This is a play more concerned with atmosphere than action, and director Josie Rourke ensures it is packed with eloquent gestures. There are golden comic moments, flashes of poetry and dense silences. The result is delicate and haunting, a bittersweet pleasure.
…Tom Scutt’s design creates the classic, old-fashioned Irish bar. Director Josie Rourke tickles perfect performances from her cast… Mr Cox saves his best till last. Jack’s closing tale of lost love is a masterpiece, not just of writing but still, almost whispered delivery. In this speech, Mr Cox pours forth much of the stage wisdom of his long years… Mr O’Hanlon here wears a beard. He tugs the heart strings with Jim’s awkward loneliness. Mr Cooper gives Finbar short-tempered swagger. Barman Brendan lacks drive and makes saucer eyes at Valerie. Fine work from McDonald and Miss Kirwan… Mr McPherson offers an alternative vision of rural comradeship moulded by memories of the dead and their still-scampering souls.
The roar of the Celtic Tiger is a long way behind us now, but the regulars in Conor McPherson's Sligo pub, who first turned up in 1997 at the Royal Court in exile in the West End (during the refurbishment) have hardly changed a jot.
Josie Rourke's keenly edged revival is a little less sombre than Ian Rickson's meticulously downbeat original, the characters less mired in the haunting, lonely atmosphere of their own conversation.
The tone is set from the minute that magnificent, craggy, great big jowly sack of a man, Brian Cox, zips up his trousers, rubs the soles of his feet on the welcome mat and calls up the first of many drinks in a long evening (though the running time is only one hour, 40 minutes) of banter and memorial yarn-spinning.
Cox is Jack the garage-owner, sometimes helped out by Ardal O'Hanlon's quietly grinning mother's boy, Jim, a furry, burr-like creature whose beard seems to be made of the same stuff as his big woolly jumper.
Their host is resigned barman Brendan, whom Peter McDonald plays with a lesser degree of consoling steadiness than did Brendan Coyle; he's more of a stay-at-home victim, just as the man who nearly got away, Risteárd Cooper's hotelier-cum-property dealer, Finbar, is the deluded wide boy riding the ripple of economic regeneration.
Brian Cox, Peter McDonald, Ardal O'Hanlon & Risteard Cooper in The Weir (photo: Helen Warner)
It's Finbar's arrival with his latest client, the Dublin fugitive Valerie, that prompts the unspooling of tales of the supernatural, of hallucinations and trembling of the "Luigi" board, the knocking on the door and the woman on the stairs, the gaping grave. Dervla Kirwan, a striking figure of innate grace and physical stateliness, is less troubled and obviously haggard than you might expect, but she's screening her sorrow in a nervous laugh and an anxiety to humour her strange new companions.
It's this peculiar Irish balancing act between breath-taking oddity and numbing normality that makes The Weir - a modern classic, that's for sure - so utterly absorbing and beguiling.
For this is an enclosed world, beautifully rendered by Rourke and her cast on Tom Scutt's brown and battered old saloon bar, defined by its own secret myths and stories, impervious to "the perverts out in the city" or the summer influx of German tourists ("Where are they from?" "Do they speak Danish, is it?") but suddenly possessed by the memory of an act of kindness in a cheese and ham sandwich, or an everyday accident in a life-changing tragedy.
