You are guaranteed a good laugh and warm welcome when you join the local lads in Brendan’s Bar county Leitrim. When a young woman arrives from Dublin, the fellas impress her with their local ghost stories but as the night draws in, Valerie will share a haunting tale of her own.
Winner of the Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and Olivier Award for Best New Play, Conor McPherson's moving, elegiac tale is a masterpiece of modern theatre. Quietly compelling and strangely chilling, The Weir is the perfect story for a winter night. Read more …
While each increasingly serious moment is upended by a series of deadly one-liners, it is McEvoy's understated stillness that resonates the most.
In the role of Valerie, a superb Lucianne McEvoy glows with concentrated pain and beauty; Brian Gleeson, Gary Lydon, Darragh Kelly and Frank McCusker give supporting performances that are close to perfection, conjuring up every minute stress and strain of a decade of momentous change in Ireland.
Superbly judged performances and a clever, organic approach to staging make for an effectively spooky time in the Lyceum’s production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir.
While storytelling and craic are at the core of this play, it is shaped as much by the silences; the space in between; the listening, all reminders that a story needs an ear and we all need to be heard.
A dynamically staged and truthfully told production which finds the haunting reality in Conor McPherson's play.
Amanda Gaughan’s excellent revival highlights the loneliness of the characters gathered to tell tales in a rural pub.
There is more than enough in the performances to recommend this play to anyone.
It's the chemistry between the cast and their security inside the dialogue that really makes the play work.
The final feeling is of a surprisingly slight presentation of a story that could resonate more deeply when played with greater relish of the details.
Just as Francis O’Connor’s design, beautifully lit by Simon Wilkinson, hints at something otherworldly just beyond the everyday setting, so this ensemble achieves a sense of the numinous that lingers in the silence at the end of the play.
This is a strong production with which to begin the second half of the Lyceum’s mainly superb 50th-anniversary season.
It's funny and poignant, a slice of life from the end of the 20th century that already feels like an AOL email from another time.
Lyceum's spring season kicks off with modern Irish classic
Amanda Gaughan and Lucianne McEvoy--The Weir
The Weir, a spectral play set in a pub that goes down easy.
Preview: The Weir
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh from Friday January 15, 2016, until Saturday February 6, 2016. More info: www.lyceum.org.uk
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