The Brightening Air: Rosie Sheehy confirms her star status in this terrific Chekhovian drama

Telegraph

25-04-2025

The last time Conor McPherson staged an original, straight play was with The Night Alive in 2013. So The Brightening Air, his long-awaited new play that sees him returning as playwright and director to the Old Vic – where his multi-award winning Bob Dylan musical Girl from the North Country premiered in 2017 – feels like a major theatrical event.
Stephen (Brian Gleeson) and Billie (Rosie Sheehy) are brother and sister living in a decaying farmhouse in County Sligo at the beginning of the 1980s. As another character puts it, they seem content to live and die with the house in which they were born. That is, until their self-made rut is disrupted by assorted family members. Chris O'Dowd is their brother Dermot, accompanied by Freya (Aisling Kearns), his age-inappropriate mistress who prompts his estranged wife Lydia (Hannah Morrish) to ask 'have you finished school, Freya?'
For her part, Lydia will go to extraordinary and baffling lengths to win back feckless Dermot including tasking Stephen, who's been carrying a torch for her since they were teenagers, to fetch her a jar of water from a well known for its magical properties so that she can bewitch Dermot. Ex-priest and uncle, Pierre (Seán McGinley), who may or may not be blind but is certainly there for duplicitous reasons, accompanied by his helper Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty) joins the fray. Into this melee of subtle and not-so-subtle digs, judgments and resentments also enters Brendan (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty), a neighbour who has the hots for Billie.
O'Dowd may be the star turn here but the standout performance in this eight-strong ensemble piece is Sheehy. The other actors are uniformly superb in a play that is by turns, convulsively funny, bleak and puzzling but it's Sheehy that my eyes kept seeking out among the bodies on stage – she channels Billie (bolshy and, to a modern audience, neurodivergent) so convincingly and with perfect comic timing.
A major part of the success of this play is driven by its atmosphere, a kind of non-human character essential to highlighting its central enquiry of what home means, what it contains and how it morphs. It is richly steeped in Irish folkloric tradition and philosophical enquiry emphasised by designer Rae Smith's diaphanous screens that partition the set at various intervals. These depict the dilapidated farmhouse, as well as dream-like landscapes and shadowy figures moving like memories and unrealised dreams at the back of the Old Vic's cavernous stage.
The play wears its Chekhovian allusions on its sleeve – the religiosity, rural setting, unrealised dreams, threats from outside and women who fawn over unworthy men are major themes within the story. In the programme notes, McPherson also states that he borrowed the four act structure from Uncle Vanya which he adapted in 2020.
This isn't a standard family drama ticking off plot points, elaborating on character motivations or playing for laughs – even though it is very funny. In fact, some plot twists and revelations are never seeded earlier in the play, or even resolved at its denouement; some viewers may find the lack of answers disorienting.
But if you can receive the play on its own merits, and tap into its stated query of 'how much living is really forgetting?', as Stephen disappears into the blackness of the recesses of the stage, then its haunting imagery will stay with you for a long time.