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.
