Perth Theatre, 8 February 2013

IN THE BAR after the show, two of the staff are playing cards.

IT looks like a game of snap rather than the poker that has dominated the second half of Conor McPherson’s play, but you can see where they got the idea from. Like the endless stream of Irish whiskey and American lager consumed on stage, the card playing is as addictive for the characters as it is compelling for us. It takes extra will power not to leave the theatre and go straight to a gambling den.

The Seafarer (photo Eamonn McGoldrick)

But if you did, who knows what demons you might conjure? The Seafarer is about James “Sharky” Harkin who is joined, in his brother’s house on Christmas Eve, by a man called Mr Lockhart. It seems Sharky has forgotten the card game he played with Lockhart 25 years ago when, in return for his freedom from police custody, he wagered his very soul. Now, Lockhart is back, ready for the follow-up game they promised. The stakes are just as high.

Not that anyone else on stage realises it. Much of the tragi-comic tension of the play lies in the contrast between Sharky’s life-and-death dilemma and the all-out hedonism of the other characters. While he looks the devil in the eye, his blind and elderly brother Richard carouses with Nicky and Ivan, his hard-drinking pals. They’re the sort who have whiskey for breakfast, spend the day on a pub crawl and return home for more drink until they crash out on the floor.

You learn everything about their attitude to alcohol in a brief exchange between the brothers. After they agree to go into town to get supplies for Christmas Day, Richard insists on dictating a shopping list. He goes into loving detail about the drink, paying attention to everyone’s favourite tipple and taking care to order enough. When it comes to the food, however, he says they’ll decide when they see it. He’s irritated even to be asked.

In Rachel O’Riordan’s production, there’s a squeamish comedy about all this. Sean O’Callaghan’s Ivan is on the self-destructive path to losing his wife and kids, but is more concerned about losing his glasses. In his white socks and designer jacket, Tony Flynn’s Nicky sees himself as a high-flyer, but is as much a slave to drink as the rest of them. And Ciaran McIntyre’s Richard is an irascible egotist whose apparent generosity and friendship is, like that of a spoilt child, always provisional.

They create the noisy backdrop (sometimes a little too noisy) to the sober confrontation between Louis Dempsey’s cautious, hard-bitten Sharky and Benny Young’s otherworldly Lockhart. What emerges from behind the play’s ribald banter is a reflection on lives wasted, mistakes made and memories lost in a haze of alcohol. Performed with ferocity by the five-strong ensemble, it is compulsively watchable.

© Mark Fisher, 2013

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• Perth Theatre
• Mark Fisher