The Brightening Air

In a story that is a hearty homage to Chekhov, Conor McPherson sits us down inside a family drama set in 1980s Ireland. Within a farmhouse kitchen, we meet two of the three McFadden siblings and the wife of the other. Billie (Rosie Sheehy) is a straight-talking obsessive who will talk about train timetables until the cows come home while her brother Stephen (Brian Gleeson) potters about checking that their cows do come home and get milked.

Their sister-in-law Lydia (Hannah Morrish) haunts the place waiting for the return of her errant husband Dermot (Chris O’Dowd) who is busy having a full-on midlife meltdown and is dating his teenage employee Freya (Aisling Kearns).Into their midst comes Pierre (Seán McGinley), a blind man who is both uncle to the McFaddens and a defrocked priest and his housekeeper Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty).

As well as the general Chekhovian vibe of a family coming together, falling apart then coming together again, there’s the themes of land ownership and inheritance. Moreover, it soon becomes apparent that there is more to the eye here as supernatural layers are added. Lydia is desperate to be back with Dermot and asks Stephen to fetch some water which he claims will bring her husband back to her, Freya has a mysterious hold over her infatuated boss and a strange miracle happens to Pierre.

In the same way that The Seagull never mentions a seagull or any seabird (thanks to a mistranslation from Russian to English which has persisted for over a century), this is not a play (despite its title) with optimism in its DNA. The name comes from WB Yeats’s 1897 poem The Song of Wandering Aengus that is about one man’s obsession with a mystical girl. It is an apt reference point as all the characters here are relentlessly focussed on someone or something, often to their own cost.

McPherson’s directing is sturdier than his writing. While we are soon engrossed in the fates of our characters, it is more through the superlative use of actors than through the dialogue which rapidly flows for a first tiring section before settling into a pattern of ebbs and flows. Conversations about God and nothingness spring from thin air and from unlikely sources and there’s rarely a real sense of time and place save for the lack of mobile phones. It is chiefly thanks to some sterling performances (particularly from Sheehy and Morrish) that we are more than happy to pass the time with this clan even when credibility is stretched towards the end.

Fans of McPherson will be relishing a return to the Old Vic of his hit Girl From The North Country. Incorporating the songs of Bob Dylan, it had an particular flavour of misery that at many points strikes straight to the heart; this latest effort only does this in fits and bursts but, when it does, leaves us with plenty to ponder.

The Brightening Air continues at the Old Vic until 14 June.


Photo: Manuel Harlan