The Ferryman

It’s harvest time in the Carney household and spirits are high. Three generations swirl around the kitchen, including rabbits, a goose and a baby. 

But there are ghosts at this feast. This is Northern Ireland, 1981. In the Maze prison, the IRA hunger strikers are dying. Out on the bog, a body has been dug up. Butterworth draws turmoil into the farmhouse, defining just how inextricably this family is entangled in Ireland’s bloodstained past.

"No matter what sort of spread you’ve planned for your Thanksgiving dinner, it won’t be a patch on the glorious feast that has been laid out at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater. That’s where Jez Butterworth’s thrilling new play “The Ferryman” opened on Sunday night, with a generosity of substance and spirit rarely seen on the stage anymore.

There is, for the record, a whopping celebratory meal at the center of this endlessly vibrant work, directed with sweeping passion and meticulous care by Sam Mendes. Its main course is a goose, which has figured as a living creature in earlier scenes, and the repast appears to be more than enough to feed the 17 revelers gathered at an overladen table in rural Northern Ireland in 1981.

But the real sustenance provided here comes from the sheer abundance within a work that picked up most of the awards on offer during its London run last year. This is theater as charged and cluttered and expansive as life itself. And the three and a quarter hours and 21 speaking parts required to tell its story — which is at once a shivery suspenser, a hearthside family portrait, a political tragedy and a journey across mythic seas — barely seem long enough to contain all it has to give us." Ben Brantley, New York Times