Thurles Drama group get ready to hit the stage with the funny and intriguing play The Seafarer

As February 13 approaches and Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer opens in The Source, audiences are in for a really funny and dramatic evening of theatre.

It will be an evening of mystery and intrigue as five men gather in the Harkin home for what appears to be a card game and a drinking session – but there is so much more.

For those of you familiar with McPherson’s work, his plays are built around a simple plot device of a gathering of some sort.

However, as the play develops, you realise that you have been pulled into a very complex world where nothing is as it seems.

The Seafarer is no exception and one of his finest plays.

One critic described this play as, “A devil of a Christmas” which is very fitting given the arrival of Mr Lockhart (David McElgun) who is clearly part and not part of this world with a very clear agenda that is not revealed until the play's climax in act two.

Structured as a long night’s journey into day, with truly frightening glimpses of a darkness that stretches into eternity.

The Seafarer turns out to be a thinking-person’s alternative to It’s a Wonderful Life. It tingles with its author’s acute and authentic sense of what is knowable and unknowable in life.

Of course it could be argued that it’s hard to know anything if you’re looking at the world through a glass of whiskey.

But don’t think for a second that the gifted Mr McPherson, who has spoken publicly of his own battles with alcohol, has written a theatrical variation on The Lost Weekend.

In the play, blindness is a key theme. Richard (Liam Ryan) is blind, the result of a recent accident on Halloween, when he fell into a Dumpster.

Ivan Curry (Matt Tracey), a hapless fellow who has adopted the Harkins’ house as a holiday dormitory, has lost his glasses and spends the play, “feeling my way around”.

Then there’s blind drunkenness, a state achieved by all of the men, including the late arrivals Nicky Giblin (Donal Ryan), a good-looking but feckless lad now keeping company with Sharky’s (Pat Loughnane) ex wife, and of course Mr Lockhart a dapper stranger who initiates a poker game in which the stakes are extremely high.

Though Mr Lockhart initially seems to blend right into the boozy camaraderie, it gradually emerges that he is a man apart, if man at all?

When he speaks to Sharky, who is doing his best to have a booze-free Christmas, Mr Lockhart is the very Devil, though his accounts of his unbearable loneliness suggest that hell is just an exaggerated version of our daily existence.

The big question is, will Sharkey see through Lockhart’s scheme and save himself in the end and redeem some of the others in the process?

Not that you think in such lofty terms while you’re listening to the liveliest, funniest dialogue ever written by Mr McPherson.
But as you leave the theatre you may wonder what you were really laughing at.

Contributed to the Tipperary Star.