Before he emerged from his own alcoholic fog, Conor McPherson often wrote plays about drunks for drunks, their narratives winding back on one another in the manner characteristic of those whose universe spans the interior of their own cranial cavity, making his stories—while damn good stories—often hard to follow. What rescues this import from London's Donmar Warehouse from suffering a similar fate is its willingness to proceed at a leisurely pace allowing us to fully absorb every last savory detail of its progress. You can't do much better than a two-hour monologue for proving that you can still memorize lines after years of piecemeal film and television jobbing. Brendan Coyle makes the most of his intimate proximity to the audience in the Goodman's Owen—even those in the upper galleries— taking his time setting up McPherson's Faustian parable of a burned-out drama critic who falls in with a circle of vampires and discovers their nightly revels to be as boring and unfulfilling as his own. (What? You thought show business was all glamour?).
