New York: The Night Alive…

I missed Conor McPherson’s latest play, The Night Alive, when it premiered at the Donmar in London in June 2013, so I was delighted to catch it at the Linda Gross Theatre in New York.

I like McPherson. His award-winning, hit play, The Weir, and it’s haunting lyricism will stay me with me for many years, while the National’s production of a later plays, The Seafarer, and it’s tale of emasculated dreams was similarly good. His comedy, gangster, buddy movie, I Went Down, which starred Brendan Gleeson, was also quite brilliant.

I wasn’t, however, totally sold on The Night Alive.

The play begins with Tommy, a ne’er-do-well who scrapes by and lives in a room in his uncle’s house, saving Amy, a young prostitute, from a beating. The ensuing relationship between the two turns into a sort of love story that offers both an escape from ultimately failed lives… until outside forces, in the shape of the young girl’s violent former boyfriend, soon bring those dreams crashing down.

The central story of a ne-er-do-well filling in time and bumbling along rather than living  life to the full is a common McPherson theme, and there are some great bits of dialogue between Tommy and his dim mate Doc and his over-bearing Uncle Maurice.

But it didn’t feel whole or finished in the same way as his previous plays did. And, even though there was violence and a murder along the way, it just didn’t feel as though it headed anywhere.

It’s still worth seeing if you get the chance, though. I’d rather take a so-so McPherson than a good of most other playwrights.