The Structural Elegance of Conor McPherson's The Weir

Conor McPherson's play The Weir (1997) achieved critical and popular success at three world-renowned theaters in the late 1990s: the Royal Court in London, the Gate in Dublin, and the Walter Kerr in New York. In London, it won the Lawrence Olivier BBC Award as the "Best New Play" of 1997–98, and McPherson received the Critics' Circle Award as the most promising playwright. In New York, where The Weir ran for eight months on Broadway, the New YorkTimes described the play as "beautiful and devious" and hailed the playwright, only twenty-seven at the time, as "a first-rate story-teller."¹ The original production, directed by Ian Rickson, went on to further triumphs in Toronto and Belfast, and The Weir has been staged, almost always to fine reviews, by troupes in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. Of particular note were productions by the Steppenwolf Company in Chicago and the Round House Theatre in Washington.

McPherson himself claimed to be baffled by all the fanfare. "It was just people talking," he said, "so it shouldn't have worked—it should have been boring."² At one level, his point is correct: The Weir includes little physical action, and its major events occur in the past, being recalled by the characters. But the same observation would apply to great Greek tragedies. And like those tragedies, The Weir observes the unities of time and place—unfolding without intermission in real time, about one hundred minutes, within the frame of a simple set: a small pub in the West of Ireland that becomes a site of both conflict and bonding. This compression is only one of the basic principles of dramatic construction in The Weir. McPherson's script also balances six other structural principles of drama—climactic order, reversal, synthesis, cause and effect, internalized action, and circularity—and the deft handling of these elements helps to explain why the play has been acclaimed so widely and so quickly as a modern classic.

These elemental plot premises generate strong emotions while conveying a subtle and compassionate sense of human life. Each element can be traced back to masterworks of Western drama, from the Greeks to Shakespeare to the modern realists. But they are also prominent in such major Irish plays as The Playboy of the Western World, Endgame, Translations, and Pentecost. In this respect, the "classic" design of The Weir also highlights distinctly Irish features of drama, and, most especially, the integration of tragedy and comedy.

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The Weir's structural elegance rests upon a unique rhythm of action, alternating between casual bar talk and a series of stories told by four of the five characters. McPherson began his theatrical career by scripting monologues—first for university and fringe groups in Dublin, and later for the Bush Theatre in London. He achieved early recognition for dramas of dissipation, especially Rum and Vodka (1994) and St. Nicholas (1997), in which a single character delivers a long confessional narrative. Even as each tale becomes more convoluted, the telling remains simple: instead of trying to act out the episodes or to assume the voices of other characters, McPherson's narrator tells a story.³ When McPherson was commissioned to write a play for the Royal Court Theatre in 1997, the artistic director, Stephen Daldry, attached a condition: the new drama could not be another monologue. Scott T. Cummings describes the resulting script as "McPherson's characteristically cheeky response to the call for him to write characters who talk to each other instead of the audience. He has them tell stories."⁴

In The Weir these stories emerge naturally out of realistic conversation, and are separated by breathing spaces for comments, arguments, or fresh rounds of drinks. As in the plays of Eugene O'Neill or Edward Albee, drink fuels the evening's successive revelations, and the particular choices—Guinness versus Harp, Irish whiskey, white wine, or glasses of brandy—can serve to mark the characters' individuality, and sometimes to establish commonality. Moreover, the simple setting of a country pub evokes a familiar picture of traditional Ireland.

According to McPherson's...