THE BRIGHTENING AIR
Old Vic
★★★★
“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.
THE BRIGHTENING AIR
Old Vic
Reviewed on 24th April 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Manuel Harlan
Previously reviewed at this venue:
A CHRISTMAS CAROL | ★★★★★ | November 2024
THE REAL THING | ★★★★ | September 2024
MACHINAL | ★★★★ | April 2024
JUST FOR ONE DAY | ★★★★ | February 2024
A CHRISTMAS CAROL | ★★★★★ | November 2023
PYGMALION | ★★★★ | September 2023
