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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.
Time Out
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
The Brightening Air
The great Irish playwright Conor McPherson returns from his long absence with a bang this year. Next up at the Old Vic is a return for his hit Dylan's musical Girl from the North Country; later this autumn he's the adapting playwright for the stage version of The Hunger Games. But before that is what the real McPherson heads have been waiting for: The Brightening Air, his first original play since The Night Alive in 2013. It's a slow, wistful start, the dial firmly tuned to 'Chekhov'. The setting is a semi-dilapidated County Sligo farmhouse, at some point in the '80s. McPherson - who also directs - meticulously builds up a sprawling cast of characters centring on the trio of siblings who inherited the farm from their father. There's intense, troubled Stephen (Brian Gleeson), who does most of the running of the place; there's train-mad Billie (Rosie Sheehy), whose tar-thick accent and general lairiness briefly distracts you from the fact she's obviously on the spectrum and incapable of independent living; and there's Dermot (Chris O'Dowd), a deeply annoying, reasonably successful businessman. Dermot has long since moved out, but the occasion of their reunion is the arrival of their uncle Pierre (Seán McGinley), a blind, discredited priest who they regard with a mix of fondness and pity. McPherson probably has a couple more characters than he strictly speaking needs here, but it's still deft stuff, a slow-burn, bittersweet drama about a family finally disintegrating under forces that have been pulling at it for decades. But this is McPherson, whose trademark as a playwright is his penchant for abrupt swings into the metaphysical. We're waiting for something supernatural to happen, and come the interval you assume this is represented in The Brightening Air by the local legend that says the water of a certain spring on the farm acts as a love potion. The ghastly Dermot has 'moved on' from his devoted wife Lydia (Hannah Morrish); he's into younger women now, it seems, apparently including Aisling Kearns's gawky Freya, who works for him and seems to have been repurposed as he PA. But Lydia is incapable of getting over Dermot, and so she asks then eventually begs Stephen to unearth the spring and bring her some of the water. In fact the second half is gloriously strange even by McPherson's standards. Rather than the family wistfully fading away Uncle Vanya -style, they seem to have rather been sucked through some sinister rupture in reality. Although there is always a fig leaf of deniability that anything supernatural is occurring, things get very weird. Freya seems to have totally changed personality, Pierre starts preaching dark, apocalyptic stuff and claims his sight is coming back; the storyline about the water comes to a head, but not in the way you might expect. McPherson's great gift is how he's able to integrate this stuff into his storytelling, how you'd never say the moments of out-and-out strangeness are actually the point of his plays. Indeed, the heart of The Brightening Air remains Sheehy's tough but intensely vulnerable Billie, who is only touched by the otherworldly side of things obliquely (perhaps her life is strange enough already). A year after her Olivier-nominated performance in Machinal, Sheehy's transformative, vanity and cliche-free turn here underscores how damn good she is and hopefully permanently elevates her to leading-actor status. Big name O'Dowd is also on fine form: he's impressively ghastly as the brittle, condescending Dermot, whose relative financial success and string of younger lovers doesn't seem to have made him even slightly happy. Although it's not explicitly clear why it's set in the '80s, you get the impression that Dermot is a representative of the free market, Thatcherite/Reaganite spirit of the decade, that the forces pulling at the family – tradition, capitalism and religion – are emblematic of the beginning of Ireland's transition to the Celtic Tiger years. Most of these characters would be content enough if nothing changed at all for them: not because that would make them actually happy, but because that would be easiest. If the debt to Chekhov is obvious, the difference here is that nobody – not even Lydia, really – is looking back fondly to a golden past. They're just surviving. But McPherson argues that change is inevitable and irresistible, be that through age, sickness, entropy, boredom or your uncle starting a doomsday cult in your house. And if nobody exactly has a happy ending, you have to conclude in most cases that change is better than stasis. The tragedy lies with Billie, whose needs lie unaddressed and barely comprehended, and for whom the family home has undoubtedly provided sanctuary. While the others are perhaps ready to be swept on by the tides of history, you sense it will be decades before the world is ready for her.
