The Brightening Air review – shades of Vanya as a Sligo family squabble, tease and wrestle

The Guardian

25-04-2025

Conor McPherson's family dysfunctional drama seems to take its inspiration from numerous sources: the title is a quote from WB Yeats's poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, which lends it an air of poetic mysticism. There are shades of Uncle Vanya, a play McPherson has adapted, with a plot involving a family reuniting in the countryside to feud over the ownership of land and inheritance. There are elements of the American family dysfunction drama too, though this is distinctly Irish in its cadence, rhythm and setting. Individually, each influence is valid and every idea is a good one but together the play seems to swing on its hinges, like this family's clapped out farm-door.
We are in the rural depths of County Sligo in 1981, inside a household run by two siblings: the stoic Stephen (Brian Gleeson), who is existing rather than living, and the eccentric and autistic Billie (Rosie Sheehy). They are marooned on the down-at-heel farm, just about making ends meet until their wealthier brother, Dermot (Chris O'Dowd) drops by. His presence coincides with the arrival of an old blind uncle and former clergyman (Seán McGinley) who has been ejected from church quarters and now shuffles into the family home with his housekeeper, Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty), with a dispute over the farm's ownership – though this plot point does not emerge until late on.
Comfy domesticity offsets abrasive sibling undercurrents as they gather around a dining table to eat, reminiscence and poke each other. McPherson, who also directs, throws in other tensions: Dermot comes with his inappropriately young squeeze, Freya (Aisling Kearns) while his estranged wife, Lydia (Hannah Morrish), still in love with her husband, puts her faith in 'magic water' that might return him to her.
The pace is too easy in the first half, as the flotsam and jetsam of family life float by. There is a good Chekhovian mix of melancholy and humour in the cross-conversational currents between family members, but it all needs more momentum and emotional drive. The second half brings more intensity but also a plot that feels stretched to aburdism: there is a miracle in the vein of the biblical Bartimaeus (the blind beggar from Jericho) alongside the falling out and making up over inheritance.
The mystical element sits well within the plotline of the magic water but becomes pronounced and protruding when characters talk about God and nothingness. You get the sense of a playwright preoccupied by big questions about the afterlife (with repeated mentions of reincarnation and the Ganges) but this sometimes sounds non sequitur in the mouths of his characters.
There are none of the explosions of an American dysfunction drama here and angry face-offs between siblings steer close to the humorous and absurd.
Sibling ribbing sometimes combusts into something more; there is wrestling between brothers, the lone sister is one of the 'lads', and home truths are occasionally spoken, or shouted, but you wish these scenes would dig into a few more nerves.
Still, there are heaps of charm and a few searing moments. McPherson's last work at the Old Vic was the musical Girl from the North Country, and there is music here too, though it is not a musical. Lovely dramatic interludes feature piano music, songs carrying Celtic lilts but also, puzzlingly, a Bollywood number.
An incredibly strong cast is gathered: O'Dowd is a delight as the family's self-regarding eldest brother and Sheehy, as always, is a standout force. She plays a largely comic character but infuses Billie with great emotion.
The idea of love and its yearning is shown with delicacy. Every character seems unrequited, from the farmhand (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) who is sweet on Billie, to the sexual undercurrents that swirl around Stephen and Lydia. Rae Smith's set is beautiful, full of diaphanous, overlying images of trees, water, misty mountains, sky, conjuring a vivid sense of place but also carrying a certain otherworldly magic. Sometimes this production lifts off, as if it is about to enter into the sublime, but is strangely dragged down by too many elements jostling to take flight.
At the Old Vic, London, until 14 June.