It was a birthday and my sister in law kindly treated my wife and I to the theatre. We sent to see The Weir at the Wyndham theatre in London.
I hadn't seen the play before. I had seen Shining City by the same scribe and admired it. The Weir has similar themes and has been very successful. This was a starry revival with Brian Cox and Ardal O'Hanlon.
The playwright has a talent and ear for drink fuelled pub chat and the way language can provide solace for disappointed lives. The five characters in the Weir spend a cold windy night in a rural Irish pub . The four men have a new audience - a Dublin woman who has moved to a house in the area. They proceed to scare her and themselves with ghost stories from the locale.
The characters (save the taciturn barman) are all haunted. The ghosts are the past and the fear is of a lonely future. The other spectre is the role of drink as comfort and anaesthetic . If the characters calmly offered each other heroin the play would seem outlandish and surreal. Instead the reality of borderline alcoholism is barely noted.
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