The Brightening Air
Old Vic Theatre, London
★★★★★
The Brightening Air, a new play by Conor McPherson, the writer best known for haunting works that blend the numinous and the normal in dingy, drink-soaked Irish rooms, begins where most plays end: with the descent of a curtain. This is apt for a production that reconfigures theatrical devices and Irish folk tales to explore how we cope when our dreams collide with reality.
The play, a nod to Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, is set in a crumbling house that one wouldn’t want to live in at the best of times, let alone in Sligo in the 1980s. Yet that’s where we find the emotionally gnarled Stephen (Brian Gleeson) and his brash sister, Billie (Rosie Sheehy), mucking along in the family home and insulating each other from the world. They’re helped occasionally by a sturdy local lad, Brendan (Eimhin FitzGerald Doherty), who likes Billie despite her best efforts.
The siblings’ not-quite-peace is disturbed by the arrival of Uncle Pierre (Seán McGinley), a newly blind, “more or less excommunicated” priest, and their older brother, Dermot (Chris O’Dowd), who owns a string of successful cafes and wears the leather jacket to prove it.
Pierre has his long-suffering help, Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty), in tow, while Desmond has unwisely come with both his wife, Lydia (Hannah Morrish), and Freya (Aisling Kearns), his 19-year-old employee and lover.
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As if the arrival of unwanted family members weren’t bad enough, the interlopers seem to have designs on the house. By early afternoon the group is drinking, swearing inventively and talking about dead relatives. It’s an Irish play, all right.
Yet The Brightening Air, which McPherson also directs, is far from conventional. Beneath the tropes (there’s a dramatic reading of a previously undisclosed will), mundane familial bitterness (recriminations over which sibling refused to install a downstairs toilet) and hilarious one-liners (most of them unprintable), the play explores the mysteries of living.
It asks why people decide to stay or go, why we love those who don’t love us back, what we inherit from family and whether we can shake off “the life that’s on us”.
Above all, the play is interested in how ordinary people cope with not knowing the answers to those questions. Some rely on the uncanny, like Lydia, who hopes that water from an enchanted well will make her husband love her again. Others, with no stories left to tell themselves, decide that to live is simply “to forget”.
The pervasive sense of a dream just out of reach is amplified by Rae Smith’s beautiful, sparse set, made up of diaphanous fabrics and scattered furniture, and by Mark Henderson’s subtle lighting design that eventually creates nothing out of something. The excellent ensemble cast delights and devastates throughout, and the occasionally stilted direction of the early scenes never really threatens the piece as a whole.
In one wistful moment Elizabeth says that life is like ice, and people use pleasure to skate over the pain. This play certainly doesn’t. The Brightening Air may glide along, propelled by laughter and comforting theatrical conventions, but McPherson always insists that we look below the surface.
The Brightening Air is at the Old Vic, London, until Saturday, June 14th
