The Ferryman(Royal Court)

This is indeed the Waltons in the shadow of the Troubles, and I loved it.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Like in the movie Jaws, we open with a scene that sets up a threat which must become relevant later. Like in Jaws, the suspense created by the impending threat allows us to wallow in family scenes, while maintaining tension concerning what's to come.

But while this set-up is effective story-telling, at it's core this is a wonderful portrait of a family that has been living with the Troubles forever.

The Carney family are introduced like a chart of a human evolution, with the youngest and smallest introduced first, a baby, utterly unspoiled by the shadow of the Troubles, through multiple children of ascending age, through their parents, and onto the generation of grandparents. How sectarianism has infected (or not infected) the thinking of each child, middle-aged, and older person is delineated with loving precision by Butterworth. Mercifully, the pattern of infection is not overly simplified, so that Brid Brennan's elderly dementia sufferer, Aunt Maggie Far Away, who drifts affectingly in and out of coherency, remains as unspoiled by prejudice as the baby, whereas Dearbhla Molloy's Aunt Pat is utterly poisoned by hatred of the other, the English. Her hatred translates even into her view of the sole Englishman in the play, John Hodgkinson's mentally impaired, but physically able, Tom Kettle, who has been in and about the family for 30 years.

What happens in the play I won't reveal (I'll leave that to the critics), but I found that I fell in love with this family and all it's members, so it all mattered.

I particularly loved the energetic, instinctive Shane Corcoran, charged with an elemental electricity by the wonderful actor, Tom Glynn-Carney, and the vibrant Caitlin Carney, played with moment to moment vivaciousness and humour by Laura Donnelly. But this is a cast filled with well-drawn characterisations, beautifully realised, by the whole ensemble, from Brid Brennan's Aunt Maggie to Paddy Considine's lynchpin lead character, Quinn Carney, to Genevieve O'Reilly's ever-so-delicate Mary Carney (how she manages to look so weak and frail in every scene is a miracle of acting).

For humour, Butterworth puts Daniel-Kitson-style-original-curse-words into the mouths of babes, a strategy that always wins laughs, and does so again here. I got a vicarious kick at seeing how much the smallest kids enjoyed getting the biggest laughs from their very adult audience, with each minor minorly corpsing at the roar of laughter following their use of expletives.

Anyhow, it is perhaps true that this show weights too much to family shenanigans, and too far from the Troubles for much of the running time, but there are so many well-observed and amusing heartfelt moments, that I was always entertained. And within each portrait of each person, and in each action also, Butterworth hides a treasure trove of insightful commentary on how we become who we are, so that, while, for me, this is not as perfect a thing as last year's "Hangmen," it is certainly one of the best shows of the year.

4 and a half stars