Latest news with #Chekhovian
New Statesman
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Run Sister Run is a winding descent into tragedy
Photo by Marc Brenner In classical Greek tragedy the audience is forced to watch as the hero sleepwalks towards their fate. In the playwright Chloë Moss's Run Sister Run, this descent into tragedy takes place in reverse. Proleptic irony is swapped out for Chekhovian drug addiction. We first meet two Irish sisters, Connie (Jo Herbert) and Ursula (Kelly Gough) in middle age. Through a series of flashbacks and call-backs, the vicious cyclical patterns that have shaped their relationship over four decades become clear. Ursula wrangles misfortune after misfortune, tangled in self-harm, surrogacy and indeterminable pills. With its folding-chair metal seating, the brick basement of the Arcola Theatre is an apt venue for the themes explored by director Marlie Haco's production: intimate and tragically uncomfortable. Designer Tomás Palmer's set is stripped back: upturned buckets and dried flowers are the few props that accompany a thin, horizontal mirror suspended at head-height. Alex Forey's white flood-lighting spills down from above the mirror, with an occasional strobe effect between scenes inducing a sense of chaos. Palmer's costume design is naturalistic and simple; ultimately, the message of the play is that tragedies like these can happen to normal people. Gough's vocal endurance is impressive. She regularly lapses into drug-induced shrieks, but is also capable of tender moments that juxtapose with the madness. More restrained, Herbert's talent is also on show, as she demonstrates the reversal of Connie's social mobility, with her middle-class English drone gradually slipping back into a broad Irish accent. The dance segments that take place in scene transitions are incongruous and discordant, untethered from the narrative. But the play's core themes of nature vs nurture and codependence are well articulated. Run Sister Run leaves the audience deep in thought, even if those thoughts sometimes include: 'What's going on now? Run Sister Run Arcola Theatre, London E8 [See also: Evita for the West End masses] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related
Arab News
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Arab News
What We Are Reading Today: All the World on a Page
Author: Andrew Kahn and Mark Lipovetsky The Russian cultural tradition treats poetry as the supreme artistic form, with Alexander Pushkin as its national hero. Modern Russian lyric poets, often on the right side of history but the wrong side of their country's politics, have engaged intensely with subjectivity, aesthetic movements, ideology (usually subversive), and literature itself. 'All the World on a Page' gathers 34 poems, written between 1907 and 2022, presenting each poem in the original Russian and an English translation, accompanied by an essay that places the poem in its cultural, historical, and biographical contexts. The poems, both canonical and lesser-known works, extend across a range of moods and scenes: Velimir Khlebnikov's Futurist revolutionary prophecy, Anna Akhmatova's lyric cycle about poetic inspiration, Vladimir Nabokov's Symbolist erotic dreamworld, and Joseph Brodsky's pastiche of a Chekhovian play set on a country estate.
Telegraph
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Brightening Air: Rosie Sheehy confirms her star status in this terrific Chekhovian drama
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.
The Guardian
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Brightening Air review – shades of Vanya as a Sligo family squabble, tease and wrestle
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.
New York Times
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Book Review: ‘The Float Test,' by Lynn Steger Strong
THE FLOAT TEST, by Lynn Steger Strong Writers are the worst, am I right? As a writer, I can say this. Whether we're following in the grand 'everything is copy' tradition of Nora Ephron or quietly 'borrowing' other people's stories, we cannot be trusted. But what happens when the writer is your beloved sister, and your whole family is kind of a disaster, with years of snubs, betrayals, and accidental and purposeful misdeeds between everyone, many of them aired in print by the writer? And what happens when, in the midst of all that, you have to go home? This powder keg of a dynamic is the backdrop to Lynn Steger Strong's latest novel, 'The Float Test,' which kicks off with an unexpected death. Deborah, the high-powered, demanding litigator matriarch of the Kenner family, suffers a fatal stroke while running. And so, during 'the hottest summer in the history of Florida summers,' the four semi-estranged Kenner siblings — Jenn, Fred, Jude and George, all middle-aged, with middle-aged problems aplenty — converge to mourn and help their now-widowed father. Jenn is the oldest of the siblings. She's the 'meanest and also sweetest,' and she now has six kids of her own. Fred, the writer, is next. She's left her husband, is living in a borrowed house, and finds herself unable to write anymore amid a crisis of conscience (and confidence) after the death of a friend. Jude, the third, who has secrets of her own, assumes the role of the novel's quasi-omniscient narrator, explaining, 'A lot of what I'm saying here I found out later; the rest, as Fred would say, I've imagined my way into , because why not.' Finally, there's George, the baby who brings to the table marital and employment problems, along with a Lhasa apso named Libby. If all that spiraling interpersonal drama isn't enough, I should mention that in the opening pages of the novel Fred finds her mother's gun. She carries it around in her bag, as we readers, in accordance with Chekhovian principle, wait for it to come out again. This, along with the mysteries of what's really going on with each sibling, and whether they can find a way to be a family again (also: why the heck did their mom have a gun in her closet?), adds propulsion, acting as a foil to the muggy daze of Florida heat and the suspended-in-animation feeling of grief imbued in the story. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
