Shining City ( Archived )

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Reviews

From L to R: Kathy Kiera Clarke, Michael McElhatton and Stanley Townsend.

The Irish playwright Conor McPherson, best known for The Weir and, in my view, the finest dramatist of his generation, almost died three years ago while still in his twenties. Those who have followed his work will probably be able to guess the cause.

All his plays, from the ominously named early work, Rum and Vodka, have been absolutely sodden with drink. No one wrote better than McPherson about garrulous old guys knocking back the Guinness and the balls of malt in down-at-heel Irish pubs, or desperate roaring boys out on the piss and causing chaos. Projectile vomiting and cataclysmic hangovers were his stock in trade, and, unsurprisingly for those of us who have also had trouble with the gargle, he seemed to view the world through a glass more darkly with each new play.

But after that near-fatal bout of pancreatitis, McPherson is back in business, still only 32, fit, sober and, best of all, writing magnificently.

Shining City is right up there with The Weir, moving, compassionate, ingenious and absolutely gripping. There were many passages at last night’s premiere when the quality of silence in the theatre was as rapt and attentive as any I have experience. But there are also scenes that provoke great, generous gales of laughter, others that send a shiver of fear down the spine.

McPherson also seems to have kicked his habit of writing almost entirely in monologues. There are long solo speeches here, riveting ones, delivered by John, a deeply troubled Dubliner in his fifties, who visits a counsellor after seeing the ghost of his wife, who was recently killed in a car crash. But we also watch the counsellor’s, Ian, a former Catholic priest who has lost his faith, in two extraordinarily intimate and painful scenes with others.

In the first, he breaks up with his uncomprehending girlfriend, who has borne him a child and helped him through his spiritual crisis. A subsequent scene explains why, as he brings a rent boy back to his office and, shaking with nerves, confesses that he has never had sex with a man, though this is clearly his natural predilection.

What the play is essentially exploring is guilt, the wreckage of the past, and the possibility of making a fresh start in life. I don’t want to set myself up as McPherson’s shrink, and ghosts are in any case a recurring motif in his work, but, in the image of the revenant wife, he is surely suggesting the haunting terrors that come to us all when we contemplate the mistakes, the deceptions, and the cruelties of our past. This is palpably a play by a writer in recovery from his own demons.

McPherson directs his own work with superb assurance, authentically capturing the intense, confessional atmosphere of counselling sessions, and making telling use of the beautiful music of Gene Clark, the American country singer who died of his own addiction to alcohol.

The performances are tremendous. It will be a long time before I forget the sight of Stanley Townsend’s face slowly collapsing with unspeakable grief as he describes his sterile relationship with his wife and her terrible return. But the actor is wonderfully funny, too, in his hilarious account of bungled adultery and a disastrous visit to a brothel, while his eventual return to the land of the living makes one feel like cheering.

Michael McElhatton is also compelling as the therapist who harbours more unresolved problems than his client, and his deeply felt scenes with his girlfriend (Kathy Kiera Clarke) and the pitiful, pitying rent boy (Tom Jordan Murphy) achieve a rare mixture of dramatic power and delicate restraint. As the title suggests, this is a play that shines.

Charles Spencer, DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10 June.

Irish drama is a haunted house: Yeats, Synge, Beckett all make use of ghostly revenants. But Conor McPherson’s is his compulsively gripping new play, co-produced by the Royal Court and the Dublin Gate, uses the idea of spectral visitation as a way of exploring his favourite theme of the rooted solitude of The Irish male.

Each of McPherson’s two main characters is wrestling with demons. John, a recently bereaved 54-year-old sales rep, is haunted by the presence of his dead wife. In a series of confessional encounters with his Dublin therapist, Ian, he reveals the hoarded guilt that rationally explains an irrational phenomenon. But, as we learn in two complementary scenes, Ian has his own anxieties: his abandonment of his partner, which we graphically witness, may have its origins in his own insecurity.

As in The Weir, McPherson brilliantly reconciles the mundane and the metaphysical. The play is anchored in the real world; yet beneath the everyday Dublin world of business meetings and fumbling adulteries lurks a powerful sense of loneliness; and McPherson implies the Irish obsession with the dead is not just a religious hangover but a consequence of failure to achieve proper contact in life.

Appropriately, it is a play full of echoes: Tom Murphy’s The Gigli Concert especially comes to mind. Yet the piece also cunningly exploits McPherson’s own gift for confessional monologues. And these are superbly handled by Stanley Townsend who reveals John’s marital misadventures with a mesmerising mixture of self-disgust and gleeful complicity.

But Michael McElhatton as Ian suggests something tense and troubled about a man who rejects his partner as decisively as he once did his faith. And the parallelism that haunts the play is intensified by the odd kinship between Kathy Kiera Clarke as Ian’s lover and Tom Jordan Murphy as a stray contact.

Rae Smith’s evocation of Ian’s spartan office and Mark Henderson’s lighting add, in McPherson’s own production, to the magnetic eeriness of a play that suggests there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our modern materialist philosophy.

Michael Billington,4 stars THE GUARDIAN, 10 June

There are lots of surprises I don’t want to give away in Conor McPherson’s impressive new play. The author of The Weir has turned his attention once again to ordinary lives touched by tragedy and a hint of the supernatural, but this time he springsrevelations on us right up to the very end.

Shining City is soused in regret and pathos, but also cheekily playful in its attitude to language and emotion. At times it’s hard to tell whether McPherson, who also directs, is being serious or having a laugh, especially in the final twist in the tale. Knowing him, it’s probably both, and it really doesn’t matter anyway, because he stokes a mood of slowly gathering suspense, and draws excellent performances from his two lead actors.

The action unfolds over eight months in a shabby-genteel Dublin consulting room designed by Rae Smith. Stanley Townsend is John, a stolid, fiftysomething Dublin catering supplier convinced that his dead wife is haunting him. Michael McElhatton is John’s therapist Ian, a man apparently untroubled by ghosts, but who turns out to have a heap of skeletons in his closet.

These men have an awkward relationship. McPherson has constructed a dialogue of unfinished sentences and dead-end Dublin banalities that is as stylised as anything by Beckett or Pinter. It can be a bit annoying in the slower moments, but it has its own hesitant poetry. This play runs the gamut of human frailty and through McPherson’s dialogue the revelations stumble out.

Townsend is tremendous as John, able to switch from stricken grief to a sort of semi-defeated swagger in a millisecond. This is McPherson at his best, laying bare the soul in all its pathetic, flawed ordinariness. McElhatton, meanwhile, is poised and perfectly still until we learn all about Ian in one fiery scene with his girlfriend Neasa (Kathy Kiera Clarke), and another featuring a beautifully judged cameo by Tom Jordan Murphy.

I really can tell you much more, for fear of spoiling it, but I will say that Shining City contains a scene that literally lifted the hairs on my scalp. To find out why and how, you’ll have to see it for yourself.

Nick Curtis, EVENING STANDARD, 10 June

At his best Conor McPherson is a writer who combines great character comedy with a real sense of pathos. And this is Conor McPherson at his very best.

Unlike his most famous play The Weir, which ran in the West End in the Nineties, this doesn’t trade on lyrical nostalgia for a lost rural Ireland.

What it does is to paint a soulful portrait of two very modern Dubliners; therapist and his client. The client is a 54-year-old man who been seeing the ghost of his dead wife at the flat where they lived alone.

Going to the therapist, it transpires he’s racked with guilt after attempting to have an affair with a beautiful woman shortly before his wife died.

But the therapist has his own problems. He an ex-priest who now splitting up with the mother of his child because of his closet gay longings.

McPherson unfolds his tale with stories unravelling from within stories and characters giving themselves away in their telling. It’s almost a form of confession that seems to suit the collection of guilty souls in what was once a very Catholic country.

Indeed, the play has a strong spiritual dimension, although it has no specific spiritual message to preach.

Instead, McPherson’s direction focuses tightly on the comedy and pain associated with his characters’ guilt and desires. Tom Jordan Murphy plays a down-on-his-luck Dublin rent boy who turns out to be an angel of mercy and Kathy Kiera Clarke plays the therapist’s desperate, angry and frightened lover.

The therapist himself is played inscrutably and sensitively by Michael McElhatton as a lost soul whose anguish is amplified in his music collection by Neil Young.

But the treat of the night is a fabulously funny yet moving performance by Stanley Townsend, which embodies McPherson’s sense of humour and compassion.

Townsend has a bear-like demeanour, breaking your heart one minute with his stuttering grief and having you laughing the next at his un-selfconscious tale of failed infidelity.

And just for good measure there’s an absolutely stunning ending which you’ll never see coming and maybe you’ll never forget.

Patrick Marmion, THE DAILY MAIL, 10 June

Guilt, sex and therapy with a script from acting heaven.

Shining City is certainly Conor McPherson’s writing at its most inspired.

Patrick Marmion, THE DAILY MAIL, 11 June

Writing and acting at its most riveting.

Benedict Nightingale, THE TIMES, 11 June

Riveting new play.

Kate Bassett, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, 13 June

Townsend is extraordinarily gripping.

John Gross, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 13 June

A haunting tale of loss and regret.

Shining City is McPherson’s most reverberating play since The Weir.

Susannah Clapp, THE OBSERVER, 13 June

Genuinely haunting theatre.

Claire Allfree, METRO, 14 June

Transcript from post-show talk with Conor McPherson

On directing his own play:

It was weird because you’re only finding out what the play is about. But for me, it was very important as a writer to direct my own work; and I direct my work as a writer because the play gives itself to me. And so my task of writing the play is not complete until I’ve finished the process with the actors. And so all the way through rehearsals we had been changing stuff and I cut stuff out. You think, ok, the way you are just standing there is saying the whole next paragraph, so let’s just get rid of that.So it’s very quick. To say what it was like, well it’s all consuming to see what you’ve learned. It’s just a wonderful experience.

On quick turnaround:

It’s crazy, it’s absolutely mad. I really still feel that I’m only getting to know this play. So I think it’s probably the people who’ve seen it tonight, and I genuinely say this, that will have a clearer and better handle of it.

On believing in ghosts:

Like in the play, I believe that people can probably see them and experience it, in a way that for them it completely real. But I don’t know if objectively there is. Hmm, I think I must. I think I must. I get frightened when I see that ghost on stage and I think that if you’re scared, you do believe.

On ambiguity of ending and possible sequel:

A play comes from a place and a time and a mood; and I don’t think you can go back there. It’s not something you plan for, and you have to be ready to write a play. This is the first time I’ve written in four years and I had to wait till I was ready. So I probably couldn’t [write a sequel]. But I think at the end, there are a lot of unanswered questions. But I think that that’s the point. That’s what it means. It’s up to us to take responsibility of what we believe. At the end, do we believe he’s going to make it? Does this ghost mean to him, here is a God and I have faith or does it mean, oh no! I have to start again, just when I was starting to get a hold of things. And negating, maybe it’s not for me, maybe I should go back to the priests. And we’re left with the question how strong is this man, who in a sense represents a man who troubled in his life. I think he represents all of us in that time where we end up hurting the wrong people, going to the wrong places for comfort, thinking we could help other people somehow by not thinking about our own thing. So he’s left at the end and that’s the question at the end of the play are we strong enough? Sometimes we are and sometimes we aren’t.

On writing characters:

I just try to make them as ordinary as I can. I just try to tune in to the emotional reality of the situation they’re in and write it up at a place that is yourself. They’re both me. It all comes from you. But it has to be very honest.

Did you start with image or place

I started with the last bit, the ghost, the image of being haunted.

A day in the life of a writer, you wrote… Why put yourself through the torture of it?

Well, just because you have to do it…you organize everything to do it, you’re driven to just do it.

Driven by what?

Oh God, hmmm? (laughs) In a funny way it’s that search. What ‘ve been thinking about recently is when the caveman or first human being that ever became conscious and realized that we exist and that we die, that we’re not just animals, we understand the existence of pain and responsibility. So then they start to draw themselves up on the cave walls. It’s a very primal drive to put it up there and see if you can try and understand your world. That’s what I think I do. It’s about putting yourself and the world as you understand it up on the stage so that I can have a look.