★★★★

“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.

MANHUNT

Royal Court

★★★★

“Samuel Edward-Cook’s performance is a tour-de-force”

Behind a metallic, gauze curtain a figure paces back and forth. Shaven headed. His shadow follows him across the vertical wall of the translucent screen – a projected alter ego pursuing its prey, fuelling the claustrophobic motions of the man’s repetitive circuit. His behaviour is erratic yet painfully routine. It’s like watching a captive animal through the bars of a zoo’s enclosure.

A flash of brilliant white light releases him to tell his story. It’s a story that dominated the front pages and caught the public imagination during the summer of 2010. That of the major police operation across Tyne and Wear – the manhunt for fugitive Raoul Moat. The ex-prisoner was on the run for nearly a week after a killing spree, ending with a six-hour standoff with armed police and Moat’s suicide. It was a story that landed in the lap of journalist Andrew Hankinson whose subsequent book inspired Robert Icke’s brutal and challenging one-act play. The overriding word on our lips is ‘why?’

“Manhunt” doesn’t offer any answers, but it poses the question from every angle, looking at the horrific events through the eyes of the victims and the perpetrator, often begging us to ask which is which. Icke’s writing and direction steer the narrative in a cyclical fashion, swinging between flashbacks and the present. It is often Kafkaesque in its approach as Moat fights a system he believes has been against him since birth. Whether we are supposed to be or not, we are drawn into Moat’s own tragedy as much as his victim’s which is unsettling to say the least. Samuel Edward-Cook’s performance is a tour-de-force that reinforces this with a warped honesty as he tries to justify himself. All the while he is surrounded by figures from his past and present: the judges and juries that accuse him of hitting his daughter; the ex-partner; his childhood self, locked in his room by his unstable mother; the father he never knew; social workers; friends, accomplices and detractors, and most importantly his victims. A poignant extended blackout heightens a first-hand account from a police officer he randomly shot and blinded in a cold-hearted act of revenge.

The supporting cast who play the multiple roles are as equally compelling as Edward-Cook, if not as frightening. This could well have been a one man show along the lines of the recent ‘Kenrex’, which follows similar themes, but the ensemble here fleshes out the account and adds a distinct and welcome light and shade. There is occasional confusion during moments when we are unsure that what we are witnessing is in Moat’s mind or in reality. Hallucinations overlap real life too often, yet it all adds to the unease, and we are constantly left unsure who to believe. So rather than collude with anybody we end up trusting no one. An unsatisfactory and dangerous position to be in, but one that maybe Icke is trying to spotlight.

Danger is an undercurrent that bursts to the surface constantly. Edward-Cook’s manic, wild-eyed stare cements this. He is a drowning man watching his life flash before him. Azusa Ono’s lighting evokes the episodes with haunting atmosphere, from the coldness of a prison cell to the campfire warmth of his last hiding place in the Northumbrian countryside. Here Moat talks to fellow Geordie, Paul Gascoigne before confronting his estranged father and being consoled by a doting grandmother. It is all unreal, but it helps him unearth the truth of his nature. There is only one conclusion. Justice takes a back seat while cause and effect – action and reaction – take centre stage.

At the time, Moat was famously labelled a ‘callous murderer… end of story’. Which is arguably the case. This play appears to challenge that assumption, but Icke’s writing is as ambiguous as the history as he tries to dig deeper. But there is no avoiding the fact that Moat was a big, strong man who used violence against those who were weaker than him. He lied, he lacked control, and he tried to justify his actions that ruined and ended lives. It is not a good story. However, Icke turns it into a breath-taking piece of theatre. We might wonder why he chose to do so, but we are enthralled and disturbed by the experience, and the performances will stick in our minds for quite a while. A gripping production. End of story.

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

MANHUNT

Royal Court

★★★★

“Samuel Edward-Cook’s performance is a tour-de-force”

MANHUNT

Royal Court

Reviewed on 8th April 2025

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Manuel Harlan

Previously reviewed at this venue:

MANHUNT

MANHUNT

MANHUNT