Conor McPherson is everywhere all of a sudden. The Brightening Air is the first of four McPherson-penned productions to open in London this year alongside the return of his Bob Dylan musical, The Girl from the North Country, also at the Old Vic, a West End revival of his seminal play The Weir starring Brendan Gleeson (father of The Brightening Air cast member Brian Gleeson) and the opening of his adaptation of the hit novel and film series The Hunger Games in a purpose-built, 1,200-seat theatre in Canary Wharf.
Going into the Old Vic, I was more excited about McPherson’s first fully original work since The Night Alive in 2013 than about revivals or screen-to-stage adaptations, even if Brendan Gleeson’s West End debut is a tasty offering. It opens – as The Night Alive closed – to the strains of Father John Misty as curtains high above the stage glisten and sway in a breeze.
The striking image gives way to the kitchen of a farmhouse in Sligo where Billie (Rosie Sheehy) is helping her sister-in-law, Lydia (Hannah Morrish), prepare the table ahead of the arrival of her uncle, the de-frocked priest Pierre (Seán McGinley) and his housekeeper, Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty), at the home she shares with her brother Stephen (Brian Gleeson).
Tensions are raised when their older brother – Lydia’s husband – Dermot (Chris O’Dowd) arrives at the reunion with his young lover, Freya (Aisling Kearns). There is a question of what to do with the farm and the house – an overdraft at the bank remains unpaid, as does farmhand Brendan’s (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) wages, though he is more interested in Billie than the money.
Having adapted Uncle Vanya in 2020, the set-up here is suitably Chekhovian – and there is an obvious parallel between the estate in The Cherry Orchard and the family’s loss-making farm – but it is grounded in Irishness. The eccentric Pierre could only be Irish, plucked from any small town in Ireland, and McGinley delivers an incredibly studied performance of the ex-priest for whom every breathy sentence carries meaning. McPherson, who also directs, carefully constructs the world these characters inhabit.
As in Chekhov, characters come and go frequently, a steady ebb and flow of cast members appearing and disappearing, the mood of the room changing depending on who is present. When two characters are surprised to find themselves alone together, we are surprised too – McPherson having subtly stripped away the surrounding cast. Some alliances and deals are made off-stage – you see silhouettes interacting deep in the bowels of Rae Smith’s set – and we sense their after-effects in the shifting atmosphere.
Other deals are made on stage. Despite Dermot having moved out of their family home, Lydia is still smitten by her husband – you wonder what she sees in the lumbering, disagreeable, self-centred wrecking ball who seems to be in self-destruct mode, caught in a midlife crisis. Lydia asks Stephen to retrieve water from a hidden well – the legend is that, if administered correctly, it can act as a love potion. He reluctantly agrees. Move over Chekhov, this is McPherson territory – supernatural magic, myths and legends.
The acting is fantastic across the cast, from O’Dowd’s disdainful Dermot and Gleeson’s despondent Stephen to Morrish’s worn-down Lydia and Sheehy’s tragic Billie.
As tensions finally reach boiling point, the supernatural does too in a crescendo that sees the balance of power in the family’s relationships turned on their heads. But the play finds itself unbalanced too – where the supernatural twist at the climax of The Night Alive delivered a sublime ending, here it ushers in an absurd final act that makes you question what the point of everything that came before was – you wonder if McPherson knows himself having allowed such a masterfully crafted work to unravel.
What we do know is that no one is happy here. Stephen gave up on happiness in favour of unrequited love many years earlier having placed all his faith in a legend that failed him while Dermot is no longer sure what happiness is. Lydia discovers that getting what she wants may not be the same as getting what she needs and that a permanent cure may not be the answer when what you want can suddenly change.
Billie, who emerges as the play’s central character, finds that what she wants may not be what others can give her, particularly when those around her struggle to accept her neurodiversity. When Brendan asks Billie why she didn’t come to meet him in the local hotel’s lounge bar, he can’t understand her response – that she simply wasn’t able to, though she wanted to: she physically couldn’t compel herself to go. Billie longs for a different ending to the story – and we do too.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (Good)
The Brightening Air is at the Old Vic, London until 14 June 2025
Read our interview with Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty about The Brightening Air here
