It takes John (Matthew Broderick) a while to explain why he’s sought treatment from Ian (Billy Carter), a newly licensed therapist. So many ehs and ers and ums issue from his mouth, it’s as though he’s lost the capacity for intelligible speech. His body remains still, but his hands stroke the fabric of the loveseat compulsively, searching for purchase. Finally he comes out with it: his wife has recently died in a car crash, but he has seen her in their Dublin home – soaking wet, staring him down. He has heard her too, banging on the bathroom door, calling for him.
“Do you believe me?” John asks plaintively.
Ian doesn’t. He should. Shining City, a play from 2004 now revived by the Irish Repertory Theatre in sure-footed if straightforward fashion, continues Conor McPherson’s enduring interest in the numinous, in what lies beyond the workaday world, in our search for answers outside our limited spheres of existence.
As a playwright, McPherson believes in ghosts as both actuality and metaphor. Here they seem to represent a kind of psychic vengeance, a guilt that prevents characters from getting on with their lives, a force that is less than benign. Though Ian is kindly dismissive of John’s claims of ghostly visitation, he does say, movingly: “There was a time when I would have given anything to see one.” He just might get his chance. And he might not like it.
Ian and John seem like very different men. John is in his 50s, a representative for a catering supplies firm and childless. He has a lost, bemused quality, a man adrift in the world. Ian is a decade younger, a former priest who now works as a counselor, and ostensibly more comfortable in his own skin. But it is less than accidental that the names John and Ian are cognates for one another. John’s life is far less secure than it seems. He has recently left his girlfriend, Neasa (Lisa Dwan), and their young daughter. He is struggling with the longings, deep but still inchoate, which made him leave the priesthood. In his quieter way, he is no less confused than John and ultimately no less vulnerable.
John is a fine role for Broderick, calling on the flutter and lassitude that have become his hallmarks over the past decade or two – replacing the cheekiness that defined his earlier career. He brings a winning helplessness to John and conveys the sense of a man struggling to find the language for ideas he never thought he’d articulate. Carter, who was excellent in the Irish Rep’s revival of McPherson’s masterpiece The Weir, brings a contrasting equilibrium to Ian, and then allows us to see how illusory it is. For those who have seen Dwan’s Beckett trilogy, it’s a treat to watch her tackle a more naturalistic role, which she does with aplomb, despite the rather tarty costuming.
Structure has never been McPherson’s strong point and in Shining City, as in The Weir, you can see him struggling to balance the work of dialogue with the monologues he gravitates to more naturally. Here this has an added poignancy, as it shows how difficult it might be to understand each other, to rescue one another, but it’s in the longer speeches, particularly John’s, that the play acquires much of its power. These solos – and the chilling ambiguity of the ending – lend Shining City its theatrical shimmer.
