Shining City
Theatre Royal Stratford East

BACK in 2004, when Shining City premiered at the Royal Court, it was, according to The Guardian’s Michael Billington, a play about men “wrestling with demons” and confessing their sins.

But in Nadia Falls’ 2021 production at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, it feels like something quite different.

At the centre of the Conor McPherson’s play still sits John (Brendon Coyle), a man haunted by the tragic recent death of his wife, Mari.

John’s therapist, Ian (Rory Keenan), quietly listens as John’s grief, regrets, mistakes and ghosts reveal themselves.

But if John can’t seem to stop talking, Ian can’t seem to start — he can’t really explain to his girlfriend Neasa why he’s leaving her, can’t really explain why he’s picked up Laurence (Curtis-Lee Ashqar), and can only congratulate John on his therapeutic progress in sentences marked by ellipses.

While John is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, Falls’ production is haunted by the play’s discussed, but absent, women.

It’s haunted by Vivienne, with whom John fails to have an affair, who is described as talking “all this bollocks […] all this shite” and it’s haunted by the mother of Laurence’s son, who is described as “nuts.”

Even Neasa, played forcefully by Michelle Fox, starts off onstage making an impassioned plea for support, but then slips from view.

In 2021, you ask why the play doesn’t put these women onstage.

Falls’ production moves slowly and is more interested in storytelling than in building the narrative tension of a traditional ghost story.

In part, this pacing is enforced on the production by Peter McKintosh’s set changes and in part it comes from Brendon Coyle’s spellbinding performance as John.

Coyle’s John relives the past as he explores it in therapy — his pain and his shame etched on his face and sculpting his posture.

But it is in this production’s slower moments that the women emerge, haunting us as Mari haunts John.

Katherine M Graham

Runs until October 23, box office: stratfordeast.com.