OW Sam Mendes (1983) was named ‘Best Director’ for his work on The Ferryman at this year’s Olivier Awards on Sunday 8 April.

Written by Jez Butterworth, with whom Sam collaborated on the 2015 motion picture Spectre, The Ferryman focuses on the disappearance of Eugene Simmons from Northern Ireland in 1981, an event that coincided with the death of the hunger strikers. As a suspected informer, it is thought likely that Simmons was murdered by the IRA: his body was found in 1984.

In the play, the fictionalised Simmons, Seamus Carney, has been missing for ten years. His wife Caitlin and son Oisin have left the family home to move in with Seamus’s parents in County Armagh.

Sam’s set is startlingly reserved and, with the exception of the opening scene, remains unchanged throughout the play. The stage comprises a farmhouse kitchen and dining room, conventional, ordinary and deliberately unremarkable: while the Carney family’s trauma is deeply personal and private, the normality of the setting in which they experience that trauma reminds the audience that grief was an epidemic in the Northern Ireland of the eighties. Tragedy was something familiar to many families gathered around the kitchen table.

The Ferryman is the fastest-selling play in Royal Court Theatre history, and has been transferred to the West End’s Gielgud Theatre for the remainder of its run until 19 May 2018.

The Cherwell‘s full review can be read here.