Meet the Playwright: Conor McPherson
Learn more about the work of the writer of THE WEIR
“I think everybody who is creative is always looking forward, really, because…that’s where the perfect work is. Everything else is a sort of flawed attempt to bring a dream alive and your past is littered with those attempts,” says Conor McPherson in an interview with journalist Steve Cummins. The Weir, his first major success as a playwright, is onstage at Lantern Theater Company November 12 — December 13, 2026.
Conor McPherson was born and raised in Dublin. As a teen, he turned his back on his strict Catholic schooling and turned instead toward writing short stories. As a student at University College Dublin, he studied Philosophy, which he says taught him about the freedom in admitting that you don’t know everything, and English, which brought him to the plays of David Mamet. Reading Glengarry Glen Ross was a fateful moment: he decided then and there that he would be a playwright, and that has been his primary employment ever since. He was active in the University’s drama society, and he joined with other members to found Fly By Night Theatre Company in 1992, which produced several of his early plays.
McPherson’s early plays were exercises in storytelling. St. Nicholas is a monologue about a theater critic’s obsession with an actress leading him into an underworld of Dublin vampires. Rum and Vodka is another monologue about a young office worker’s three-day bender that nearly destroys his home life. His play This Lime Tree Bower is a set of three interlocking monologues from young men who find themselves in difficult situations of their own making. From his earliest writing, McPherson was invested in the act of storytelling and the power of words.
1997’s The Weir was a natural next step: unlike most of these early works, the five characters gather in a remote pub — locals Brendan, Jim, Jack, and Finbar and recent Dublin transplant Valerie. The centerpieces of the play, though, are the stories they share with each other: eerie tales of fairies, ghosts, and loss, hauntings both supernatural and deeply human. Powered by the chilling tales and the palpable warmth of the five lonely souls finding companionship together, The Weir was an international hit, launching the 27-year-old McPherson to transatlantic success. It premiered first at the Royal Court Upstairs, a 60-seat venue that put the audience practically inside the rural pub. It quickly transferred to the West End and earned a 1999 Broadway production, followed by many high-profile revivals over the next three decades.
While this first major success launched McPherson into high demand, it did not help when it came to writing what came next. “We did it, and it was great, but it’s no use to you as a playwright. Because when you’re on your next thing, you’re just starting all over again and The Weir can’t help you, in fact it probably inhibits you. You’ve just got to move on,” McPherson told Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the national public service broadcaster of the Republic of Ireland.
Get Lantern Theater Company’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
And move on he did. The Weir was not a fluke — McPherson is considered one of Ireland’s great living playwrights. Following The Weir, his work has often focused on storytelling and loneliness. Dublin Carol takes place during a dark night of the soul as an undertaker tells a young coworker about how alcohol has destroyed his life. Port Authority is made up of three interlocking monologues from three men: one young, one middle-aged, and one old. The Night Alive is about a group of down-and-out people finding a fragile community in a Dublin bedsit.
Another theme from The Weir that recurs in McPherson’s work is the supernatural — though he’s never just writing spooky stories. The otherworldly in McPherson’s plays is always a tool for getting at something deep and true about the here and now. His early monologue St. Nicholas and The Weir were followed by two other plays that deal with something beyond our mortal coil: 2004’s Shining City is about a man coming to a former-priest-turned-therapist for help when he believes his late wife’s ghost is haunting their home. And 2006’s The Seafarer seems at first to be a domestic drama about a group of middle-aged men gathering for a game of poker over the holidays before one of their company reveals himself to be a demon playing for a greater prize: another character’s soul.
McPherson has also worked on other people’s stories — he has adapted Daphne du Maurier’s horror story The Birds, Strindberg’s Dance of Death, and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He’s also adapted The Hunger Games novels for the stage, and he incorporated the music of Bob Dylan into an original story for Girl From the North Country — a musical that examines some of McPherson’s most prevalent themes of loneliness, connection, and building a fragile community, with a touch of the supernatural.
McPherson is unique in how he approaches production of his plays: he is often his works’ first director, and then he rarely ever sees another production of the play, having closed the chapter. “For me, the first production of a play is really an extension — or even a continuation — of the writing of the play because only when you see it coming to life can you really understand what it is. … When you get into it and you’re directing it, sometimes what you are trying to do is to solve all its problems. In a way you’ve wrecked your dream by making it real, which is not to say that it’s bad, but just that that particular process is at an end,” he tells Steve Cummins.
But though McPherson’s plays often examine different takes on recurring themes — loneliness, self-destructiveness, community, storytelling, and the supernatural — he doesn’t go into a new play planning on what it will explore. His plays are born of inspiration; he describes it as seeing a room with people in it and being curious about what happens to them. As for themes, “the play ends up being what it’s about because that’s what it’s about,” he tells Cummins, “but I don’t really know that at the beginning.” Like the storytellers of The Weir, McPherson’s tales reveal more than he meant when he started telling them.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of The Weir by Conor McPherson is onstage November 12 through December 13, 2026, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
