Mcpherson S the Weir an Invasion

Dustin Flake

Eng 362 3/28/11

McPherson’s The Weir an Invasion Conor McPherson’s The Weir takes place in a contemporary Irish countryside somewhere outside of Dublin. Specifically it takes place is Brendan’s bar where many of the characters often visit. For the male characters, the pub is a safe haven where they can escape the women in their lives but this balance is upset when Finbar brings one of his new tenants, Valerie, to the bar. Despite the fact that Valerie does her best not to upset the balance of power within the bar, her presence throws the men into an uproar. However this is not the first encounter any of the men have with a woman in the play. Once Brendan enters the bar, he and Jack discuss his earlier encounter with his sisters during the day. Brendan couldn’t be happier that they are finally gone because they always treat him like he can’t run his life on his own. The wind also has great significance early on in the play. Both Jack and Brendan have difficulty getting to the bar because of the wind that has started blowing outside. This difficulty is an extension of the pressure each character faces from the women in their life. For Brendan, it is his sisters, while for Jack it is his wife. The wind also functions as a mechanism to foreshadow the ghost stories that the characters will tell later in the night. Jack lets Brendan know that Finbar is planning on bringing one of his tenants into the pub later that night. He also lets Brendan know that Finbar is telling people that he is thinking about leaving his wife for Valerie, the tenant. Just then Jimmy enters and continues Jack’s story about Finbar by adding that he saw Finbar showing Valerie around town. By this time Brendan already has been exposed to the mythology that Jack and Jimmy have created about Valerie. She becomes an image of the ideal woman rather than a character before they meet her. To Branden, she is a pretty girl who Finbar is vexed with. The fact that Valerie is coming also upsets Brendan because Jack makes a joke that Brendan scares all of the girls away. Once Valerie arrives, the entire dynamic between the group changes because every man tries to appease her in whatever way they can. Both Finbar and Brendan argue for a while, about who will buy Valerie her drinks. The men pressure Valerie to drink and when she decides she wants to have white wine, this also puts the men in an awkward position. Brendan rushes into the house to fetch a bottle for her. Jack says that it “is not often wine flows here.”1 This is the first spoken acknowledgement that Valerie, that a woman,’s presence had caused the patrons of the bar. Brendan, of course, has no problem fetching the bottle for her because he wants to please her. Once Brendan

1 McPherson, Conor leaves, Finbar asks Valerie to sit up straight. Rather than sounding like a parental figure, it comes off as a way to idolize her. This makes sense because none of the characters really seem to understand how to communicate with women. Throughout most of the play, the men spend their time talking to Valerie but she only replies to be cordial and not to contribute anything to the conversation. The men continually try to get her to consume more alcohol by “filling her glass.” More often than not, she refuses by saying,” Oh no, I’m ok for the moment, thanks.”2 At first glance, it seems like she doesn’t want to be there just as much as Brendan didn’t want her to be there at the beginning of the play. This may be because of the control the other males try to exert upon her. Jack tells her that Jim can fix up her place if she wants him to. Soon, Valerie gets her wine and she starts to drink it and calls it beautiful. The men watch her as she drinks and can’t take their eyes off her. After this happens, the group starts to talk about how Jim bets on the horse races and has a system forto winning. This applies to the invasion of the bar because he invades the track house and exerts his own system onto the place. He is an invader in his own right because he makes a profit off of another area. Once his story is over, Finbar tries to get Valerie and the rest of the characters in the bar to have another drink, but both she and Brendan refuse. The fact that Valerie refuses isn’t all that surprising but Brendan’s refusal catches the reader off guard. The reason he is doing this is because he starts to feel an odd kinship with Valerie because neither one of them are comfortable with the situation they are placed in. Finbar makes the situation more uncomfortable by paying Brendan twenty dollars for drinks for the rest of the patrons but adds to Brendan, “ I wouldn’t say you see many twenties in here.”3 Valerie tries to diffuse the situation by walking over to the pictures that are hanging in the bar. However, all this does is incite more excessive masculinity showdowns between the men. Valerie says that Finbar looks like his father but Brendan doesn’t. This leads the rest of the men to assert that Brendan looks much more like his mother, bringing his more feminine features to a focus. By this time, it is obvvious that Finbar is doing the majority of the talking and it seems to be getting on the nerves of the other men. This is because he is the one that Valerie is paying attention to and they assume that it is because he is talking so much. Finbar acknowledges these concerns and suggests that they start to tell stories to try and make a more relaxing environment. Brendan and Jimmy agree to this suggestion but insist they wait for Jack to come back from the bathroom to tell the story because he is the best at it. The first story is told by Jack and is pretty childish in the respect that it is about fairies. More specifically it is a story about how the building Valerie now lives in was once on a path knows as “Fairy Road”. The story focuses on a woman named Maura who used to come into the bar and tell the story about her

2 McPherson 321 3 Mcpherson 321 and her mother. Her mother used to play jokes on her brothers and sisters by pretending people were at the door when no one was there. At this point in the story, Jack starts to treat Valerie like a child because he says; “ There wasn’t a kitchen back in those days, Valerie.”4 The story continues when Jack lets Valerie know that one night Maura and her mother are home alone and there is a rapping at the door and they are both frightened. After the encounter, they decide to have their house blessed because it was once a part of fairy road. This is significant because the house goes a significant change from the past to be ready for the future. In the same way, the bar must go through a change in order to incorporate the beautiful young woman. A type of ritual happens again once the story is finished. The men offer to fill Valerie’s glass of wine but once again she decides against it. However, the men are pleased when she accepts the cigarette they offer her. By doing this, she becomes initiated into their group similar to the blessing of the house once it was discovered that it had a connection to Fairy Road. However, the men are reluctant to tell another ghost story because they feel Valerie will be afraid because she lives in a haunted house. This shows that they still have reservations about accepting her into the group. Despite this, Finbar does eventually start to tell his story. One day, the Walshes move across the street from Finbar along with their three daughters. Finbar doesn’t hide the fact that he was happy that there were three more beautiful young women around him. The mother comes to see Finbar one day because she is worried because her daughters have been playing with a oiji board and one of the daughters is afraid that a spirit is chasing her. It got so bad that she wouldn’t leave the living room because she saw a woman standing at the top of the stairs the no one else can see. Once they sedate the daughter to move her, her brother calls to say they see their dead neighbor in the backyard. This story also represents an inability to move away from the past because someone is intruding on territory. The daughter was encroaching on the territory of the dead by playing with the oiji board and Valerie continues to encroach on the men in their bar. Jim tells the next story and claims it happened over twenty years ago. The story is about Jim and Declan Donnely digging a grave while drinking on the job. A man walks from the church to where the two are digging and tells them that they are digging the wrong grave. He takes them to a grave of a little girl and they later learn that the man was the soul of the man they were digging a grave for and he was a pedophile. Valerie asks him if he thought the man was a hallucination from the drinking and he replies that he still doesn’t know. Valerie beings to look a bit sick and Brendan takes her inside to go to the bathroom to try and make her feel better. The reader starts to believe that the culmination of ghost stories is starting to negatively affect Valerie. Once she leaves, the men resume their

4 Mcpherson 325 hostilities toward each other. They all blame each other as the cause for Valerie’s pain. Finbar does add that he believes Jim is wearing a suit to impress Valerie. However, when Valerie returns, the entire tone of the story changes when Valerie reveals why she had to leave for a moment. Valerie begins to speak and for the first time, she gives herself a voice rather than just replying to the comments the men make. The first revelation she makes is that she is the mother of her daughter Niamh. This revelation immediately puts her in a new perspective for the men. If she has a daughter, more than likely she is married, and no longer a sexual option. Because of this, the men remain silent as she continues her story. When Valerie continues her story, she reveals that Niamh wanted to take swimming lessons and she signed her up for classes and reveals that her daughter is afraid of the dark. She has bad dreams where she is trapped in the darkness and can’t asleep. One day, Valerie is running late when she picks up Nihn from a swim meat but when she gets there, Niamhn is dead because she hit her head at the bottom of the pool. After a few weeks, Valerie still really isn’t able to cope with her daughter’s death and stays at home. One morning the phone rings and it is Niamhn. She tells her mother that she is ready to be collected. Niamhn isI scared because it is just like the bad dreams she had about the darkness, compete with the children knocking at the windows. She explains that her husband, Daniel, just assumed she didn’t know how to deal with her daughter’s death. She concludes her story by saying that she is in the country rto try and escape her husband but she still believes the phone call occurred. “She still need me.”5 As soon as Valerie is done talking, the men don’t have any trouble talking even though they don’t really know how to respond to the situation. They immediately suggest that she was dreaming, and Valerie is reminded of Daniel because he didn’t believe her either. The only man who seems to give her a break is Brendan and this could be just as likely that he is annoyed with the men rather than actually believing Valerie. Finbar has had enough once Valerie tells hr story and invites her to leave with him. She decides to stay and once Finbar leaves, the bar seems to ooze melancholic thought. When Finbar leaves, he awkwardly kisses her on the cheek and lets her know that he will call her. She doesn’t really care. Valerie tries to buy a round of drinks for Brendan and Jack but they won’t let her. This suggests that despite her contribution of a story, she is still not a part of their group. She asks Jack to tell a story, and his story contributes a much greater understanding to the dynamics behind the bar community than anyone else’s story. The story he tells is about a girl he dated a long time ago and was intvited to her wedding. He was put off by the way she treated him at the wedding. She treats him like she would any other guest and he leaves because he thought she would be nicer to him. He retreats to a bar down the street where the bartender fixes him a sandwich, which gives him the strength to go back to the

5 McPherson 342 wedding and reception. This story is significant because Valerie is going through a circumstance where she also needs to the strength to go on living life. The story concludes with the remaining patrons musing about how one day they will all be ghosts. As the night winds down, the theme of invasion turns it’s head once more when Valerie asks Jack if he will be returning to the bar anytime soon. He replies that he won’t and Brendan says it is because of the German’s who will be visiting the countryside soon. However, they seem to recognize that they need each other right now in life as Jack tells Valerie that if she can bear having the Germans in the bar, then so will he. They even make a joke that Finbar will probably be back and try to get Valerie to like him. Valerie jokingly states that maybe she will just have to go home with one of the German men, even though none of the characters know if the men are actually German. In conclusion, The Weir is a play about invasion. This is most readily apparent by the way Valerie enters the bar and all of the men faun all over her. Secondly the play is about ghost stories, and what is true and what isn’t. Valerie’s story is much more believable then the stories heard up until that point, even though there are supernatural elements to the story. In the end, they all decide they need each other because life is so difficult without help.

I’m really glad you wrote about this play. I saw it at The gate in Dublin in 2007, one of the best performances I’ve ever seen, there or anywhere.