The Structural Elegance of Conor McPherson's The Weir

Abstract

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 McPher son received the Critics' Circle Award as the most promising playwright. In New York, where The Weir ran for eight months on Broadway, the New York Times described the play as beautiful and devious and hailed the playwright, only twenty-seven at the time, as first-rate story-teller.1 The original pro duction, 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 peo ple talking, he said, 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.