Conor McPherson’s Broadway production The Seafarer doesn’t inspire much sympathy for the devil, even when he’s pitted against four deadbeat alcoholics. For one thing, he doesn’t like music. His features are arranged a constant glare, with hooded brow shadowing steely eyes that thinly mask an undercurrent of seething wrath with cold austerity.

He arrives in the small Irish town of Baldoyle one Christmas Eve in the form of Mr. Lockhart (Ciaran Hinds), an overgrown brute of a man, seemingly ready to burst the seams of his brown suit at any moment. He’s here to settle an old debt; after beating Sharky Harkin (David Morse) at poker, he intends to take him back to Hell. Over the course of the evening, Lockhart never once breaks into a smile, though he frequently sneers; and while he gets drunk on homemade pochine, he takes pleasure in nothing.

The main character Sharky is one of those terminal failures at all of life’s attempts, from jobs to women; a pitiful character who mutely suffers his brother’s incessant put downs. Recently returned from another failed exploit, his current goal is to stay on the wagon, at which you know from the outset he will certainly fail. He is surrounded from the crack of dawn by drunks and drink, namely his brother Richard, played brilliantly by Jim Norton, whose recent blindness serves as no obstacle to his constant quest for booze. Richard’s friend Ivan should have gone home to his wife and kids days ago, but never sobers up enough to make a rational decision or find his glasses. The fourth drunk is Nicky, the last person in the world Sharky wants over at the house. Nicky, who lives with Sharky’s ex-wife, was invited over by the antagonizing Richard, and not coincidentally it is he who brings Lockhart to darken Sharky’s doorstep.

Christmas Eve at the Harkins’ is a rollicking slapstick display of Ivan and Richard blindly undermining Sharky’s attempt to stay sober by forcing as much alcohol as possible down their own gullets. The hilarity is punctuated by more poignant moments, as Sharky’s failings are pointed out to him again and again. But later, when Lockhart and Nicky arrive, the revelry takes a sinister turn.

In a haze of gullibility and drunken ignorance, Lockhart easily persuades the men to join him in a game of poker, revealing his true identity only to Sharky towards the end of the first act, in order that he may suffer his impending doom for the entire second act. As Sharky reels from the revelation, the others carouse in a state of complete indifference, perceiving Sharky’s stunned anguish as his typical spoilsport attitude and nothing more malign. Even Lockhart’s sly revelation of each man’s past sins only briefly dampens the spirit, and the solution to that, Richard surmises, is to put on one of the CDs Sharky received for Christmas. At the opening chords of John Martyn’s “Solid Air,” Lockhart grabs his skull with both hands, as if trying to force the noise back out, his face a twisted mess of agony. Too polite a host to ignore his guest’s obvious discomfort, Richard turns the music off, but the unasked question lingers: who doesn’t like music?

Here you may secretly hope for a Wizard of Oz-style ending, whereupon discovering his adversary’s achilles heel, Sharky blasts the Stones until Satan is reduced to a pile of ashes, but McPherson is too smart and insightful for that. He has created an all-powerful enemy, and an underdog, and only a conclusion where the underdog beats the devil at his own game will satisfy, even if the outcome is achieved through sheer Irish luck. This, in fact, results in a more touching resolution.

As the devil finally slouches off in defeat, Nicky heads back to his girlfriend and Ivan goes home to make amends to his wife, Richard and Sharky are for once alone, brothers together. It’s Christmas, there’s plenty to drink, and they can play John Martyn’s “Sweet Little Mystery” as loud as they want.

–Julia Clarke