Slice of Afterlife

The Weir
Watermark Theatre, North Rustico
November 14, 2024

Even with Halloween behind us, November is a spooky month—darkening skies, descending temperatures, dying leaves—so it’s a good time for spooky stories. ACT leans into that seasonal vibe again this year with The Weir, an acclaimed drama penned by Irish playwright Conor McPherson in 1997. 

Set in a rural bar near the town Carrick-on-Shannon in the northern Irish county of Leitrim, The Weir (named for a local river’s dam referenced in the play) takes place in a single blustery night, during which five people swap eerie stories over drinks. The conversation becomes doubly haunting as personal traumas and regrets gradually mix with the ghost stories and tales of local folklore. 

The Weir is structurally reminiscent of the great British horror film Dead of Night (1945), another script in which a group of people take turns telling scary stories. Comparatively naturalistic and rooted in a much firmer sense of place, The Weir is a more grounded, nuanced and low-key affair. This subdued approach makes the play seem more real, and sometimes much more moving, but with less dramatic flair given The Weir’s scant plot and quietly anticlimactic ending. McPherson himself has described his play as “just people talking.” 

Like ACT’s 2023 production of West Moon, The Weir is a spooky smalltown story with resonance for PEI. The men of this play are mostly lifelong residents of a small community that’s getting smaller and more isolated as the years go by, an uncomfortably familiar concept for many Islanders. It’s part of what makes McPherson’s storytellers lonely on both micro and macro levels, oft-solitary people rooted in an ever more lonesome landscape. A streak of melancholy ripples persistently through the script and its characters. 

Those characters include bar owner Brendan (played here by Malachi Rowswell), local garage mechanic Jack (Brian Matthie), local handyman Jim (Sam Edgcomb), prosperous married businessman Finbar Mack (Ryan Whitty) and intriguing newcomer Valerie (Laura Stapleton), a young lady from Dublin who has just moved into a nearby house. The men reminisce about their shared past and vie for Valerie’s attention, trying to impress her or spook her with their dark tales, though the talk grows more personal and confessional as the night wears on.

Stapleton gives the best performance of the evening, aided by having the juiciest role in the play. The whole cast are capable and have an easy rapport with each other, essential to the feel of the piece, though occasional lapses in articulation or projection can make parts of the dialogue tricky to follow with everyone speaking in accented Irish dialects. 

Producer Carter Baird, director Gordon Cobb and stage manager/set designer Sharon MacDonald dress and furnish the Watermark stage just enough to conjure the key components of Brendan’s bar, and Pat Caron’s intermittent windy sound effects add a little atmosphere. 

Adele Thomas, director of a 2017 touring production of The Weir, once cautioned that the script is “so hyper naturalistic, it can very easily become a mumbley play about people in a pub.” Cobb and company mostly avoid that here. There are static stretches where it feels like we spend a bit too long with the players chatting in profile upstage, but the blocking gets a little looser over the course of the night to the show’s benefit; and thanks in large part to some able actors, ACT’s production of The Weir conveys much of the play’s humour, humanity and heart.