★★★★

“a rich and entertaining family drama”

“How are you doing?”, a priest asks jittery Dermot (Chris O’Dowd) midway through this fine new play. “I’m fine”, replies deadpan Dermot, although “the circumstances around me are challenging”.

Dermot is not alone in his plight. In the ramshackle Irish farmhouse that is the setting for Conor McPherson’s eagerly anticipated Chekhov adjacent play, the circumstances would test the most placid of souls.

The future of the farmhouse brings the family together as uneasily as opposing magnets. Three siblings own the place. Two live there and the third – Dermot amid a midlife crisis – has returned from afar thinking there’s money to be made.

He has an ally in a blind renegade priest (Seán McGinley) – their uncle – but finds himself in opposition to his brother Stephen (Brian Gleeson) and sister Billie (Rosie Sheehy) who have made the place their home, combatting the damp, fighting off foxes and shuffling cows with a mindless resilience.

Like the mouldering walls, the family tensions have been left to fester so there’s more than a reckoning about property deeds in McPherson’s atmospheric and busy play.

Elsewhere Lydia (Hannah Morrish) wants a magic potion – “water with muck in” – to win back faithless Dermot’s love, but Dermot, railing impotently against the strictures of family, has found himself beguiled by 19-year-old minx Freya (Aisling Kearns) who turns up with an air of entitlement and her own little plots to pursue.

Billie, accident-prone and on the autistic spectrum, obsesses about trains, paint and chimpanzees. She also speaks in unvarnished and abrasive truths which is a useful means to bring simmering tensions to the boil. Stephen is angry – about having to look after Billie, but also having no life, no money, no love…

Writer-director McPherson says he conceived the 1980s-set drama in an airport after he was thwarted by Covid from seeing his own adaptation of Uncle Vanya. But knowledge of Chekhov is less use than an ear for Irish dialect and an ability to keep up with the scores yet to be settled.

The title, McPherson says, comes from a WB Yeats poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, and “encapsulates that moment where dreams meet reality, and our most important illusions fade away”.

The ensemble cast fully embraces the opportunities presented by a phenomenal script, littered with miracles, mysticism and mischief. O’Dowd is a marvel, wiry and self-pitying. He brings his immense comedic presence to a play that is very, very funny. Rosie Sheehy is by turns blunt and lyrical, even her recitations of train routes hinting at romance and adventure. Morrish and Gleeson are the stoic heartbeat of the piece.

The first acts are all about slow-burn set-up against Rae Smith’s barren farmhouse backdrop. Which means the post-interval plot twists are something of a hurried cascade. Even in a play which relies on a hint of folkloric magic, the dramas happen unfeasibly fast, relying on an overworked denouement to create a sense of theme and purpose.

Pacing aside, this is a rich and entertaining family drama, delighting in the divisions that uniquely arise from semi-strangers who are bound together by the same blood and forebears.

SKATEPARK

SADLER’S WELLS EAST

★★★★

“a dizzying meld of music and movement”

The spacious new Sadler’s Wells theatre in Stratford’s Olympic Park was established in part to capture the raw urban energy of East London, a bottom-up approach to curation giving platforms to non-traditional and ethnic performers.

In the foyer, free dance classes, with participants looking out on the Aquatic Centre and London Stadium. Elsewhere, break dancing, hip hop, kathak and waacking, reflecting the diversity and curated sub-cultures of those who live nearby.

Skatepark, from Danish dancer and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen is a case in point. Straight from the half-pipes of some grimy streetscape to the gilded stage of Sadler’s Wells.

To underscore those credentials, Ingvartsen gives over the vast stage – ramps, grind rails, ledges – to local skate groups for a pre-performance, with some of the riders having been hand-picked from earlier workshops to join the core company.

The whole thing is raw energy, with a rap battle vibe, tinged with noir and playing to a younger-skewing audience. If the event had nothing else to evidence its visit than community impact it would have done its job.

Fortunately, there is plenty here. Twelve performers as a hypnotic, throbbing whirligig.

At first the free-form chaos of the pre-performance spills into the production proper and there’s an anarchy of skaters playing, showing off, riding their luck.

But, gradually, something more organised takes shape, the individuals coalesce, and patterns emerge.

Human nature insists we impose a story. Perhaps the skatepark is a Petri dish, an evolution of sorts, with individuals merging, co-operating, learning how to communicate and ultimately forming a cohesive hive mind. Something out of nothing.

The look and feel are essential. There are the typical hard-edged urban trappings – steel barriers, neon graffiti, a sense of outsiders playing their thrashing sounds too loud. The cast comes out of Snow Crash or Mad Max, some punk dystopia. They occasionally wear disturbing masks or lose themselves in voluminous hoodies.

Not just skateboards either, but roller skates, and Parkour, human agency matching wheeled efficiency. There’s an electric guitar and urgent street timpani. Most effectively, the skaters can become singers and dancers too, throwing shapes or exhibiting the fever and madness of the mosh pit.

And forever there is a heartbeat bass pumping, like life itself, sometimes with Eurotrash vocals shouted in our faces, other times – hauntingly – delivered as monk-like chants accompanied by sweeping, balletic movement in the semi-dark.

This all builds, slowly, organically, with imperfections and tumbles and missteps. The subtle progression suggests an inevitable self-organising drive, like an ant march on wheels.

This leads to a truly rousing climax, a dizzying meld of music and movement. The audience is swelling too, co-opted into this ragged community of souls.

THE BRIGHTENING AIR

Old Vic

★★★★

“a rich and entertaining family drama”

THE BRIGHTENING AIR

Old Vic

Reviewed on 24th April 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Manuel Harlan

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE BRIGHTENING AIR

THE BRIGHTENING AIR

THE BRIGHTENING AIR

SKATEPARK

SADLER’S WELLS EAST

★★★★

“a dizzying meld of music and movement”

SKATEPARK

SADLER’S WELLS EAST

Reviewed on 10th April 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Pierre Gondard

Previously reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

Skatepark

Skatepark

Skatepark

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