The Weir

The ghosts that disturb us the most are born of isolation, despair, frustrated longings and hopelessness. The ghost that stands at your bedside at three a.m. is a mutilated memory gesturing with a grotesque significance that only you can fully grasp. In the great ghost stories by Henry James, particularly "The Jolly Corner", we sense that every ghost represents a murder, but the murder of some aspect of the self. These themes resonate with Conor McPherson's disturbing, but oddly bracing play, "The Weir." In a small village in picturesque Ireland -- in season, the place is primarily haunted by foreign tourists scornfully called "the Germans" -- a couple of bachelor drunks are boozing in a pub. With the proprietor, they discuss a married friend, Finbar, who seems to have taken an interest in a Dublin divorcee recently moved into a cottage that he rents. Someone has written that most plays follow an archetype that can be characterized as "a stranger comes to town" and this describes, in general form, the scheme of the work. With the young woman, Finbar, who runs a hotel that competes, more or less, with the pub, arrives at the bar and everyone gets a little bit drunk. Outside it is suitably dark and windy and, ultimately, the men begin exchanging ghost stories. We expect the young woman to remain merely an auditor, but, in fact, she tells the most horrific of the tales, a story that is genuinely and deeply unsettling, involving a ghost a bit like the apparition imagined in the first chapters of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights." Notwithstanding its dire content, and the play revolves around the death by accident of a young child, "The Weir" is very funny and eloquent -- the Irishmen exchange a variety of colorful insults and the language is always vivid and gripping. The play is not so much concerned with ghostly events as it is about the effects of experiencing a haunting, how an encounter of this kind lingers in the memory and comes to serve, perhaps, as a sort of symbol for a blighted existence. In many respects, the play suggests Chekhov and is similarly wise, I think, and rueful. In the face of the great and lonely dark, we have only one another, the little semblance of a community in the tavern buffetted by wind. And, indeed, the play ends on a mildly positive note -- one of the men remembers an act of kindness that "fortified him" many years before and offers that kindness to the griefstricken young woman. Very little actually happens in "The Weir" and there is no twist, no surprising revelation. But, perhaps, for these reasons, the play is excellent and memorable. (I saw this show in a very forthright and superbly acted revival -- the piece was written in the late nineties -- at the Irish Repertory Theater on west 22nd Street in New York City on Friday, August 16, 2014.)