On a recent blustery afternoon, Jez Butterworth, whose extraordinary play, “The Ferryman,” opened, in November, on Broadway, after a sold-out run in London’s West End, sat with his hands cupped around a pint of Guinness, wearing a blue sweater, a fedora, and blue jeans, and sporting a full beard. We were at the Ear Inn, on Spring Street, a few paces from the Hudson, listening to the hiss of cars headed toward the Holland Tunnel. Last year in London, “The Ferryman,” which is about what happens to a complicated, boisterous, rural, hard-drinking, hilarious Irish family when one of them disappears during the height of the Troubles, won Olivier Awards for best new play, best director (Sam Mendes), and best actress (Laura Donnelly). The play is that rare thing: as you sit in the audience, you know you are watching theatre history happen. (For me, that’s occurred only once before, at the first New York production of Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.”) When I mention the Olivier Awards, Butterworth lights up. “Three out of the four women in the play were nominated for Olivier Awards, and Laura won!” He smiled. “I grew up with four boys, but now I spend all my time with women! I love the about-face my life has taken!”
Like Butterworth’s play “Jerusalem,” which opened in New York, in 2011, with Mark Rylance as Johnny (Rooster) Byron, a performance for which he won a Tony Award, “The Ferryman” is a barge that carries a lot of cargo—love, loss, empty bottles, the past and present tense, rants and endearments—but at the center of the play is a passion for the preservation of what is closest to the heart, and for keeping a modicum of dignity in the face of almost insurmountable odds. In the bar, Butterworth recalls one inspiration for the play: “It came to me in a blinding flash. I watched a man on the street in London hit by a car and thrown forty feet, and he got up and pretended nothing happened!”
The action occurs almost entirely over twenty-four hours in a vast, cluttered kitchen in rural Ireland, and is based on a story from Laura Donnelly’s own family. In 1981, the year she was born, her twenty-six-year-old uncle, Eugene, who had ties to the I.R.A., disappeared; his body was found three years later, in a bog in County Louth. As in “The Ferryman,” the I.R.A. circulated rumors saying that he’d been seen, to keep the family’s hope alive. On the set, there’s a big table in the middle of the room, and a staircase leading upstairs, which gets a lot of traffic. “It’s an odd experience for me,” Butterworth, nursing his Guinness, says. “It’s an away and a home game. It’s set in my kitchen!” He pauses. “That is, it’s not mine anymore, it belongs to my ex-wife, Gilly, but Bel [Butterworth’s daughter], who is eleven years old, visits the stage, and she’s in her kitchen. She knows what’s in every drawer!”
The first act opens, pretty much, in the kitchen. It’s almost dawn. Quinn Carney, an I.R.A. man in hiding, and his sister-in-law, Caitlin, are still up. They’ve been drinking all night. There’s a sexy tenderness between them that makes the audience shift in their seats, and they’re arguing about who Caitlin would save in a lifeboat if she could choose between the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin. The banter is hilarious and a little raw, and stuff happens, as it does late at night: a lamp catches fire, they put on blindfolds and slow dance. Butterfield says, “I made a decision to put the last scene at the start of the play! That’s what happens at the end of plays—people put on blindfolds and dance. I want the audience to fall in love in the first five minutes.” Three of Butterworth’s plays, “Mojo,” “Jerusalem,” and “The Ferryman,” start with people staying up all night. He says, “I have some experience with this—I seek it out. Usually, it’s until three or four in the morning. It’s an almost religious experience. . . . Staying up all night is necessary indeed.”
Butterworth can wait ten or even fifteen years after having an idea, to write a play. If the idea is still on his mind after all that time, he gives it a shot. He tries hard not to write plays. He says, “To want to sit and write plays is not what plays want. They want to wait for you to give in. At the moment, I’m carrying around three or four ideas, but it can’t be how I felt then about it. If it is, I run the risk of not being right. Or at least I think that’s it. Maybe it’s a rationalization!”
Butterworth wrote “The Ferryman” for Donnelly, with whom he has two daughters, Radha, age two, and Ailbhe, who is a year old. He has two older daughters, Bel and Gracie, with his ex-wife, Gilly Butterworth, who still lives in the house they shared in Devon. For the duration of the run, he is staying on Broome Street, in Manhattan. He laughs and says, “The other day we had to fill out a form answering the question ‘Where do you live,’ and Laura put down London and I put down Devon, which is telling.” He paused. “There are so many parts of modernity that are just best to leave alone. I saw a documentary about Keith Richards, and in it he said he’s a contented man: with the exception of people, who, you know, come and go, everything he loves will be there in the morning. The blues, for instance—that can keep you from being anxious in the digital age.”
Butterworth ordered another Guinness and a plate of fries from a waitress who appeared out of the gloom. But doesn’t he feel the world encroaching? I asked. Even in Devon? “Jerusalem,” after all, is a play about the wasting of green places. Butterworth looked into his glass, then said, “Well, if I were sixty years older than I am now, I would have been my age when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Would I worry about it? Would I channel it and write about it? Yes. For example, I happened to be in New York on 9/11, with my brother John-Henry. ‘The Ferryman’ is about how to fight for freedom and how that in itself can edge over into terrorism.”
In the bar, there are some crayons on the white paper tablecloth. Butterworth picks up the purple, draws a half circle the size of a thumbprint, and colors it in. Then he draws a yellow half circle, adjoining it. “See that?” he says. “If purple is the unsayable—that’s the half of it. Then I have to find the other, yellow bit, that hitches up to something that’s happened. I’m always working about with the purple bit. In ‘The Ferryman,’ the idea of people vanishing within a relationship, and not being able to carry the dead to the afterworld, those were personal to me. It’s a hardy idea: that in the time on earth you have to connect. Is that person in the room with you? Do they want what’s best for you, or do you want what’s best for them? When I became aware that this had happened in Laura’s family, well, I thought to myself first, Now, who would do that? A fucking Englishman writing a play about Northern Ireland!”
He scribbled an asterisk on the table. In “The Ferryman,” the character of Aunt Maggie Faraway, who sits in the corner of the kitchen, played with dreamy mania by Fionnula Flanagan, is based on Butterworth’s grandmother, who would doze in the family living room, and switch off and on like a shortwave radio. She’d be gone for days, and then she’d come back. Some fifteen years later, in that same kitchen in Devon (where the play is set), Butterworth’s sister, Jo, sat in a wheelchair after receiving a brain-cancer diagnosis. Butterworth says, “It was the same, there were moments of clarity. And I’ve added to that story of Aunt Maggie’s impossible love for Francis Maloney. Francis Malone was the name of my paternal grandfather. And I have someone in my life with whom what could have happened never happened. It’s all there together. They’re all losses. They’re all disappointments. All three are sudden absences.”
Someone who is there and then gone. The world wobbles on its hinges. In “The Ferryman,” the character of Tom Kettle, the daft Englishman who works odd jobs for the Carney family, and produces rabbits from his pockets for the children, is based on a man by the same surname whom Butterworth knew as a boy, who proposed to his mother a week after his father died. Butterworth says, “He was a factotum—he worked in the rose garden. He wasn’t the full bucket! He came ’round with flowers, and I heard the whole thing through an open window. It was the most dramatic thing I’d ever heard. I don’t usually do it, cutting something out from life and putting it in the collage.” He laughed. “Mostly you should resist it!”
Butterworth was born in London, near London Bridge, in 1969, in a family of four boys and one girl. When he was seven, the family moved to St. Albans, outside of London, to a house he describes as “between three motorways.” He knew that he wanted to be an actor when he played a Roman soldier in his first Christmas show. The children wriggled into their costumes in a dark classroom, and then went out onstage transformed, in full makeup. He was hooked. The only classes that he liked in secondary school were drama and creative writing, which each met only once a week. He skated by and left school with next to no qualifications. Around the same time, his elder brother Tom went up to Cambridge. Jez visited him in his first year, and they saw a production of Brian Friel’s “Translations.” Butterworth recalls, “Afterwards there was a party, and there were girls! It was wonderful! I went home and decided that I was going to go to Cambridge.” Somehow, he got an interview—he told the examiners that he would take every exam he needed to gain entrance, and he would get an A in every subject. He smiles. “And I did it! And once I got there they thought, Well, maybe we’ll keep him.”
In addition to his brother John-Henry, Butterworth has worked with his other brother Tom, who is a screenwriter, on the 2018 Sky series “Britannia,” a historical “Lord of the Rings”-meets-“Games of Thrones” drama, which the Independent called “bonkers, but never boring.” (The Guardian headline ran: “Giant squid and sexed-up druids: is Britannia Jez Butterworth’s mad masterpiece?”) I mention that I watched the first episode. Butterworth lets out a cross between a hoot and chuckle. “It gets better! I swear! We wrote it to amuse ourselves, it’s a glorious freewheeling mess of a story. There’s a moment in the second series—an entire league of Romans is doused by magic mushrooms by the Druids! I do it for that stuff!” He paused to order another Guinness, then said, “It’s about what happens when you have your own set of gods, and another set shows up.” The theme song for “Britannica “is Donovan’s dreamy, trippy Celtic song “Hurdy Gurdy Man,” a divining rod tip-tapping for a gone world. In the back of the bar, we share a moment of rapt silence in honor of Donovan. Butterworth smiles and says, of the song, “No one gets it, but it’s a clue to what we’re doing, over the long haul! But, generally, my plays are set in one place, over twenty-four hours!”
But isn’t “The Ferryman” ’s first scene set miles away from the Carney farm, backed up against a brick wall in Belfast? Butterworth throws up his hands. “Aristotle allows you a prologue! The best thing that can happen is that the play plots against you. It hoodwinks you. My plays aren’t intent on making things clear.” One of the deep pleasures of watching “The Ferryman”—although those pleasures are laced with heartbreak—is seeing how Butterworth uses theatrical conventions to circumvent expectations. We think we know the devil by name, but it turns out we don’t. And we’re surprised by sources of joy: a moment in which Aunt Maggie Faraway predicts the future, the sight of a Carney infant bicycling its legs onstage. A few weeks ago, a woman came up to Butterworth after a performance, rapped him on the shoulder, and said, “What happens to the family?” When he told her he didn’t know, she replied, with asperity, “Yeah, I thought so.”
A few days before we met, Butterworth was met with another question: Why does the baby in “The Ferryman” have to be a real baby? (A real baby it is. Each time I’ve seen “The Ferryman,” I’ve held my breath, waiting for a squall; so far, the baby—there are a number of infants, who alternate—chortles and plays with its toes.) The play also features a live goose—alive for a bit, at least. Outside the bar, it started to storm, and the hiss of traffic going under the river grew louder. Butterworth said, “I told them, ‘Siegfried and Roy don’t use stuffed tigers!’ It’s a trick. It draws you in. In the first moments, the lamp catches fire. It reminds you: this is not a movie.”
Sourse: newyorker.com
