Review by Simon Jenner, April 24th 2025
The numinous hovers over many Conor McPherson plays. In The Brightening Air directed by McPherson himself at the Old Vic till June 14th, immanence meets the illusory in this Chekhovian four-act work set in a farmhouse deep in Ireland in 1981.
Billie (Rosie Sheehy, returning to the Old Vic after her Olivier-nominated performance in Machinal) and Stephen (Brian Gleeson) are siblings whose life is exploded by the return of elder brother Dermot (Chris O’Dowd), his abandoned wife Lydia (Hannah Morrish) and former priest blind Uncle Pierre (Sean McGinley). And everyone comes trailing someone else in this eight-strong ensemble, tangling a cat’s cradle of desires. It’s hilariously dysfunctional, nearly tragic, nearly or truly magical, invoking the shimmering of folklore with its flick of cruelty.
Rosie Sheehy and Hannah Morrish. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan
McPherson too seems haunted by his adaptation of Uncle Vanya he never got to see through the interruption of Covid. There’s other echoes: the Chekhovian side of Brian Friel for instance. Rational classicists though are ghosted with the promise of a miraculous well and a couple of miracles that seem nothing to do with it. With another lucky barman called Brendan (as in The Weir), it’s clear McPherson’s playfully revisiting his earlier self. He’s also questioning that self. There’s a logical twist, and yet the air brightens as Yeats’ poem (invoked by McPherson) reminds us.
Sheehy’s Billie is sardonically literal but witty too in some of the best cut-through laughs of the night. She cuts across gruff, disappointed Stephen who as Gleeson shows in a pewter gleam of warmth, seems set to look after his chicken-tending sister for life. She’s special: not fey, almost anti-fey with recitations of rail journeys from here to the Ganges, her obsessive, articulate facts about chimpanzees or other litanies she obsesses over. Both have found occasional sexual relief: Stephen with his uncle’s housekeeper Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty), Billie with local barman Brendan (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) living with his mother. But neither will commit, they push away: in Billie’s case literally during sex as Brendan laments, recalling an encounter.
But has anyone another option? Strangely most have, some buried deep as the well Lydia asks Stephen to fetch mucky water from, to bring back her husband. Even here there’s a backstory not revealed till the end. As Lydia Morrish is heartbreaking; almost crafting arias of longing you can see hanging in the air. At one moment she’s explosive with desire and grief for what’s been withdrawn from her. At others Morrish hovers like a golden shadow, flickering with silence.
Lydia precedes her errant husband as O’Dowd’s Dermot rolls in. In O’Dowd’s hands Dermot’s more than a charming, chancing mid-forties drinker. Making himself (as Dermot might put it) a very Sebastian as a target for laughter, he talks of himself as a heroic figure in the third person: “getting up at the crack of dark” in self-justification. There’s stinging rebukes, for instance “not living in the house I grew up in.” In rollicking stab-short sentences Dermot’s mid-life plea flails and sputters. Not yet a drunk he’s insolently brought 19-year-old lover Freya (a winningly sidelong, witchy Aisling Kearns) to strut his virility and determination to slough off everything. McPherson has him trail off more sentences than most, blustering indefensible actions to Lydia.
Each character is given a moment of revelation. Kearns emerges from under O’Dowd’s tokenism to make choices, stake her paganism and finally address Morrish. Crotty, addressing Gleeson in a long conversation the morning after, tells him he smells of “alone-ness” and talks of the way “everybody uses pleasure, to skate off the surface of everything. High over the horrific depths. … just across the next little crack.” At such moments Crotty shines with self-accepting knowledge. Billie scorches atheism in short skirling blasts as her fear of abandonment pushes away her chances. Doherty’s Brendan is pushed aside so often you see he’s the observer gifted with choices; and Doherty’s rise to a quiet blaze find its time.
McGinley’s Pierre only comes into his own in Act Three, where his first lecture: “I was marked for bigger things – perhaps even at the Vatican” occasions a delicious adlib from O’Dowd. His shocking revelations precede one that shocks him, another charismatic man whose hold over Elizabeth as someone (unlike Stephen) is as she states “going somewhere”.
Rosie Sheehy and Hannah Morrish. Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan
Stephen, whose presence haunts the others, doesn’t reveal his truest feelings till near the end which sparks his own eloquence, in the way Gleeson’s dull gleam soars into brightness and botched miracles. In a fragile, aching moment between two actors possibilities are played out. Billie’s feelings are fretted through lists, where longing is a recitation of connections. When motives see the light, even Billie’s routine has to recalibrate. “It’s nature” she remarks in a lapidary way to explain an act unmooring her life. Though when it comes to act Sheehy’s inching to warmth and for her, startling declaration, is charged with what you feel might outpace her.
Rae Smith’s cavernous set fines down to a simple table, a piano brother and mostly sister surprise us with (Ravel’s Pavane), and Mark Henderson’s lighting that throws up video projections with a bluish stripped curtain effect beckoning the beyond. Gregory Clarke’s sound thrubs some hits, but mainly circles ambient thunder and the quieter music of the house.
Sheehy and O’Dowd are outstanding, but in this ensemble everyone radiates with unforgettable performances; sometimes in a few seconds. For the most part deeply satisfying yet The Brightening Air refuses to land the way The Weir does. It also teases, for instance with loose ends only Billie has the bleak heart to prophesy. Her final hymn to Lydia speaks for them all, wherever they think they’re headed.
When his last original play The Night Alive opened in 2013, McPherson asserted that playwrights were only at their best for around 20 years: he’d debuted in 1992. Skipping over his adaptations, surely The Brightening Air redeems that bald self-proscription. Redemption though has long been a McPherson theme. Here, you have to dig as deep as that well, and bring in a lot of muck. Drinking it off isn’t always best-timed. Or by the right people. McPherson is haunted and haunter.
Movement & Intimacy Lucy Hind, Casting Serena Hill CDG, Voice Charlie Hughes-D’Aeth, Dialect Daniele Lydon, Fights Kate Waters
Associate Director Anastasia Osei-Kuffour, Associate Set Niall McKeever
Costume Supervisor Poppy Hall, Hair, Wigs & Make-Up Supervisor Kim Kasim, Wigs, Props Supervisor Fahmida Bakht, Music Associate Ben McQuigg
Rosie Sheehy (Billie) and Brian Gleeson (Stephen) in The Brightening Air at The Old Vic (2025). Photo by Manuel Harlan
