Seafarer (National & tour)

Do you remember the 1960s Irish singing trio, The Bachelors? Two of them are still around, apparently, and the duet is memorialised, hilariously, at the start of Conor McPherson’s new play’s second act when two drunks launch into a close harmony, nerve-jangling version of “I Believe” on Christmas Eve.

The Seafarer takes its title from an Old English poem about an isolated wanderer lost on the freezing sea with memories of companionship in the mead hall and a sudden rush of perception about the evanescent material world. This state of grace has not yet been achieved by Karl Johhnson’s haunted Sharky, but a mysterious businessman from Howth turns up in this grim Dublin basement to remind Sharkey that he killed a man in the back of a pub one night and that he still “has the hots” for the wife of his ex-employer down in Hinch.

That man, Mr Lockhart, is the devil in disguise and he’s after Sharky’s soul. Sharky has lost his chauffeuring job and is now reduced to mopping up after his – literally — blind-drunk brother, one of the Bachelors tribute duo. Old Richard lost his sight when he fell into a skip last Halloween. He’s locked in the seasonal bender with two other local wasters who dare not go home to their wives and families. And the inevitable card game results in Mr Lockhart setting the agenda before the tables are turned in a most surprising fashion.

You could complain that the small world of Conor McPherson is always the same from play to play. Drink, Christmas, confession, hidden secrets and haunting stories are recurrent characteristics. But he writes so beautifully and extracts such variation on this old-fashioned male preserve that you never feel the subject is exhausted.

After a near-perfect first act, though, you do feel that the play needs editing and that McPherson, who directs, should have cut and reshaped the second act. It’s odd, too, that in so specifically Irish a play, the protagonists, Sparky and Lockhart, are played by English actors, even if Karl Johnson as the first and Ron Cook as his near nemesis are outstandingly good. Johnson looks as though his insides are being gnawed away by guilt and despondency, while Cook exudes dangerous bonhomie in his snappy suit and angled titfer.

Jim Norton’s glazed and stumbling Richard is a magisterial portrait of carpet-slippered low life, cunningly exploiting his blindness to cadge any drink going and embodying, and imbibing, the Christmas spirit with Dickensian relish. His permanent guest Ivan is played with brilliant slobber by Conleth Hill, bumping into the furniture (he’s a man as separated from his spectacles as he is from his wife) and throwing tea on the carpet to hastily replenish the cup with a proper beverage before Sharky re-enters the room. Michael McElhatton’s street-wise, self-deluding Nicky completes the biggest bunch of losers since last season’s Sunderland football team.

– Michael Coveney