Review: Brendan Gleeson, boss of the bar stool

Conor McPherson’s play The Weir is about a motley group of individuals gathering in a pub in rural Ireland during a storm and getting totally sloshed.

It’s a great conceit for McPherson as writer and director as the form has to be naturalistic. This lot can’t be expected to be especially coherent, nor can their conversations or indeed the play, be expected to necessarily go anywhere.

The set designer Rae Smith has brilliantly captured the feel of a dingy dark old pub and Brendan Gleeson dominates the proceedings on his stool at the bar holding forth. The bar is so geared to the needs of its male clientele that Owen McDonnell’s innkeeper never got around to putting in a ladies’ lavatory. So the arrival of Kate Phillips as a newcomer to the area is the cause of quite a few urgent rethinks.

There is a lyrical, even dreamlike quality to the piece and Gleeson is superb as the rather sad old bachelor reflecting on life’s lost opportunities. McDonnell, Phillips, along with Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as the local spiv and the ever reliable Sean McGinley as an old bore with a penchant for ghost stories, still manage to hold their own against him.

Still, audience members – in common with all those who make the decision to drink in moderation or not at all among a group of people who have decided to drink a great deal – could be forgiven for occasionally feeling a little left out and not finding some of the jokes as hysterically funny as those telling them.

The Weir is at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, until December 6