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Mickey Jo
It would be an oversimplification for me to characterize this play as a 1980s Irish uncle Vanya, but hey, it's also a bit of an oversimplification to write an autistic character who's simply obsessed with trains. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to you if you're listening on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. I am a professional theatre critic here on social media and I was recently invited to see the most recent production at the Old Fick Theatre here in London, which is the Brightening Air, a new play written and directed by Connor McPherson. Now this is actually his first time creating a wholly new play in some years, I believe in over a decade. He has created a handful of jukebox musicals in recent years, including Cold War at the Almeida Theatre, including the very successful Girl from the north country at the Old Vic, which subsequently transferred to the West End, went on to tour around the uk, transferred to Broadway as being adapted for film, and is about to return to the Old Vic Theatre this summer. But amidst all of this success, it's certainly interesting to hear what he has to say with his first new play in a long time. And there is much that interested me, in fact, about this production. It was very thought provoking and I'm going to share some of those thoughts with you today with my full review of the Brightening Air at the Old Vic Theatre. If you have had a chance to see this production for yourself, I would love to know what you thought about it in the comments section down below. And if you enjoy listening to my thoughts, make sure you're subscribed right here on YouTube or following me on podcast platforms so you don't miss any upcoming reviews. But with no further dilly dallying, let's talk about it. What did I think of the Brightening Air at the Old Vic? So I was struck quite quickly by the tonal similarities and even the narrative similarities between this and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. It feels very Chekhov in places, but we do encounter a pair of decidedly miserable siblings tending to the farm and the grounds of a shared family home. We have more successful relatives returning from elsewhere, resulting in a sort of claustrophobic reunion where old tensions and even romances arise. There's even a character we meet who is introduced to us as Uncle Pierre, though he is sometimes also referred to as Father because he's a former member of the clergy. It's there where the more exact Uncle Vanya parallels end but it was interesting to read in the program that this was sort of Inspired by Conor McPherson's adaptation of Uncle Vanya that played in early 2020 at the Harold Pinter Theatre, a production directed by Ian Rickson that I saw, that I thoroughly enjoyed, actually, but one that he never got to see because he was over in new with the Girl from the North Country. Both productions were shut down, of course, by Covid, and only the Girl from the north country ever reopened. So he describes this as something of a response to the Vanya that he never got to meet. Only, of course, rather than adapting Chekhov's characters, he's writing his own and with complete creative control as director as well. There's a very interesting start to this where it sort of subverts the traditional expectation of how a play is to begin. Rather than a curtain rising to reveal a set, we've been looking at a fairly bare stage the entire time, with a draped cloth curtain descending as the play begins. It's sort of translucent and ethereal and gently wafting, and there is a sense of the magical and the mystical about everything that is to follow, though it's also at the same time very grounded in stark reality. As the curtain descends, two women go about essentially building up the set. They're going about their daily routine of putting things in place and completing mundane tasks, while one of them engages the other in what we perceive to be a fairly one sided conversation about trains and the local railway network, the underlying sentiment of which is the notion of escape, the idea of the train as this thing that could carry them away from their miserable lives. They're in the cold and wet Irish countryside and there's dreadful damp in the house, which is messily organized, and there's a bird's nest in the corridor. And the young woman, Billy, she's the one who's particularly keen on trains, remarks at one point that she and her brother, who lives there with her, tend to sit in the kitchen before correcting herself. We live in the kitchen. This amidst the conversation where the returning relatives who share in ownership of the property but don't live there themselves, are shocked at the condition that it's in. To which the other resident, the middle of three siblings, the younger of two brothers whose name is Steven, points out to them that even turning on the lights is wildly expensive. Again, very much with the Uncle Vanya parallels. Now, before I take you any further through this narrative, I think it's important to get to know these characters a little, because that's exactly what we're doing at this moment, and we get an early sensation about Billy, that the conversation about Trains is a hyper fixation. And that sort of gets confirmed throughout the rest of the piece. It's never said outright, but she is presented to us fairly opaquely as an autistic character. And yes, Trains, being the hyper fixation of choice, does feel like a little bit of a tired trope at the same time, you know, it's set in the 80s. Are tropes tropes for a reason? I don't know. For what it's worth, she also describes having previous fascinations with chimpanzees. If you're concerned at all at this point about the representation of an autistic character, it does get worse. But until it does, she's a really brilliantly spirited character who injects a lot of lively energy into a fairly dull and muted family reunion. One which Steven, her older brother, middle of the three, is clearly miserable about. But everything we've seen of Steven, everything we will go on to see of Steven, is entirely miserable. Billy's played by Rosie Sheehy, Stephen by Brian Gleason. He is a character whose depressions are twofold. One source of his angst is only really made clear to us in the final moments of the play. The other starts to creep in fairly early on because the other woman who I told you about, who is preparing a lunch, who is helping Billy to get the tables ready, her name is Lydia and she is Steven's sister in law, the wife of his older brother Lydia, who is played by Hannah Morrish. She engages him in a conversation about water from the magical well, that there was this legend about when they were younger. And in fact she even asks Procure some on her behalf. He replies that that's going to cost her 500 pounds. She shares that she wants to give it to her husband. The water allegedly having the capabilities of making somebody fall in love with the first person who they glimpse when they awaken from sleep. And she needs this in order to repair their failing marriage for the sake of their young children. Because he is currently conducting an ongoing affair with a 19 year old employee, one who, staggeringly, he brings to the family reunion. The family reunion that is happening to celebrate the homecoming of their elderly Uncle P, the one who used to be a clergyman, but who, we find out, has been essentially excommunicated for his radical positions on Christianity. More on those later, but I promise they're worth the wait. Now, before we move too far away from Lydia, I want to explain the context in which she represents this source of misery for Steven. Because we can tell immediately that there is this unlit flame of chemistry betwixt the two of them, that there is something there. Even if her husband does not currently reciprocate her adoration, there is clearly something that they both sense in each other. With her and Steven, we come to find out that there is this unrequited history, parts of which she may or may not have known about. But let's just say she's not the first person who has tried to use the magical water to her own advantage. What's interesting about the dialogue here in general is that a lot of the conversations and a lot of the speech that takes place is retrospective. So many of these characters feel so rooted to the past and things that took place, Whether that's as simple as, like, the jobs that they've done that day and whether or not remembered to shut the gate for the chickens or things which happened years ago and family history. And there's no sense of future because there's little hope for any of them. What is there to look forward to? They're all stuck in the past in that sense. There's one really wonderful exchange between Lydia and Steven that really lets us know where we are in terms of the emotions at play here. When she talks about old wounds that linger and turn into arthritis, to which his very brooding, emotionally indifferent response is not if you don't feel anything anymore. Now let's talk about the eldest of the three siblings, whose name is Dermot. He's played by Chris O'Dowd, and we learn that he is the most successful of the three, both financially and in terms of having escaped the family home, having created a family for himself. Not that that enoxiates him, however, in any way. From a midlife crisis all of his own, like I said, having a very public affair with the employee Freya, who is closer to his daughter's age than his own, and stunning everyone by brazenly bringing her to his childhood home, not realizing that his wife was going to be there. But despite this, the energy that Der brings into this reunion is one of gentle antagonism. He is poking and prodding at his younger brother Stephen, and just gently enraging him. Slowly, he seems to us to grow more selfish by the sentence. And every other line is decorated with F bombs as adjectives indicating his many frustrations, his frustration about his own marriage, his frustration about his siblings and the state of this house. There's also a sort of horrifying scene in which he demands a hug from his younger sister, Billy, despite her her protestations in order to deliberately instigate a meltdown and show her behavior in front of a young gentleman from the town who has been working on the farm who seems to have taken a liking to her. His name is Brendan. And the scenes that they share together are both very refreshing and very illuminating about Billy as a character, because she also doesn't self identify in any particular way when it comes to neurodivergence. However, when talking about their planned meeting in town and her not having shown up when they previously scheduled one, she shares that there are certain things she's just not able to do. And she repeatedly says this, accenting, I'm not able to. I'm not able to. Which hints at confirming the kind of ideas that are being instilled here in the audience. And it's with these kind of resentments, false starts and unspoken grudges that we head into the second of structurally four acts. And because this is more a play about people and ideas and their perspectives than events, I'm not going to walk you through the entirety of the narrative. Instead, let's talk about some themes that are being explored here. Now. There is a lot of conversation about faith and about religion. This is introduced at first with a prolonged chat about burial and the circumstances of burial and whether it would be advantageous to be buried publicly, or whether you know this prevents you having any kind of rest in your final resting place. About whether characters who had chosen this for themselves would regret it with passing traffic and the inability to enjoy any privacy and death. This corresponds to a lot of conversation that's had in the second of the place four acts about the nature of solitude. There's a post coital moment between two unexpected lovers, unexpected to us in the audience because there's been little to indicate unless you were really reading between the lines, but not unexpected to them because it had happened for the first time years before, in which one says to the other, you smell of aloneness. Soon afterwards, the same character who produced that line shares her view that everyone uses pleasure in order to sustain themselves over periods of misery, metaphorically likened to cracks in the ice and gulfs of despair that lie beneath. And this feels like the crux of much of the play. A lot of these characters doing simply what they need to in order to survive miserable circumstances and realities. And this notion of life is an experience where you're trying to find just enough buoyancy in the comfort of others and love and lust, or whatever it is. In order to keep from total depression and existential despair. Now, as it happens, this way of thinking is actually very proximal to the teachings of Father Pierre, Uncle Pierre to his niece and nephews, who tells us in the third act about his radical interpretation of Christianity. And he believes that his perception of the way that the world is and what he perceives as a crucible of suffering is evidence enough of a malevolent God, one who is not omni benevolent, but instead who he describes as an evil bastard God very articulately and as he recounts the chapters of his life and the moment when, as a young boy, he first saw a vision and discovered that this was his calling, before realizing that his calling later in life was actually something a lot more specific. It's really, really wild how fast we get from I saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in the bush in the garden to the Vatican are out to get me and we're all destined for hell. And if you think you know where eccentric Uncle Pierre is going all of this, and why he's gathered all of the family together on his insistence like he's Ms. Marple about to tell them who did the murdering, then I assure you there's still room for surprise. And this is a little bit of a spoiler alert more than anything I've told you already, so feel free to skip ahead to the next section. But it turns out that he, in league with Dermot, is contesting the will by which the house that they are all in and the grounds and the land and the farm were left to the three siblings by his late brother, and not instead, as he believes ought to be the case, with 50% going to him. And so he and Dermot, with 66.6 recurring percent between them, and I enjoyed the chat about percentages, had a great time with that. Instead, plan to usurp the situation and oust Dermot's two younger siblings from their miserable home in order to turn it into a religious retreat for like minded lunatics. And I'll admit I did not see that coming. And if there's little more said about religion, there's a decent amount still to cover in terms of folklore and myth and magic. Because not only do we have the magical love potion, water and all of the revelations attached to that and its implementation in the later scenes of the play, but we also have a character suddenly stricken with life altering disability, falling to the floor in pain with little control over their legs, while another charact simultaneously is suddenly able to see again. And Freya, the young 19 year old mistress of Dermot, who I told you about earlier, is characterized as a witch by a particularly resentful Billy. This after she'd already witnessed Freya flirting very openly, manipulatively and sort of effortlessly with Brendan in a way that Billy never seemed able to. There is clearly an affection between Billy and Brendan, but Billy is not able to explore that very easily. And between that a little bit of gossip about Freya's family, the sudden ailments of her uncle Billy, comes to the conclusion that Freya must obviously be a witch. My takeaway from which is that this is in response to Billy perceiving a character being able to navigate the world very differently to how she can and in ways that she can't understand. And though there's fleeting evidence that Billy might actually be onto something here, there's a moment where Freya appears again when she's sort of almost invoked in the sentence, when Dermot seems as though he might be about to make reference to her. My conclusion was that there's little credible mysticism at play. Instead it's just what these characters cling to in order to try and explain their circumstances. And it ultimately comes back, as does the play itself, to Billy and her autism. And I'll share with you that it's at this point in the play, as this is all unfolding, that I'm starting to feel just a little bit uncomfortable about the way that this is being utilized as a plot point and not for the first time by this particular playwright. I don't know Conor McPherson's life. And while that might represent some difficult and painful honesty for Steven, it also a hugely harmful trope. And if the whole smited down with disability and suddenly cured of blindness thing hadn't already got us feeling a little bit dubious here. Then concluding with the idea, huge spoiler alert, of Steven simply walking through to the darkness at the back of the stage. That represents Glasgow, by the way, because he feels as though Billy's autism is killing him. Does feel quite insensitive. It's a salad really of insensitivity. The dressing on which is Chris O'Dowd once again portraying disability. But I just think I have to flee to Scotland because your autism is killing me. Really just a hell of a place for us to end up. Finally then, let's talk a little more about the performances, the writing and some of the creative elements. Now. I find Colin McPherson's writing very interesting. I mean, there's a lot of brilliant characterful dialogue. There are also some slightly more heavy handed moments where the. The lines don't feel necessarily entirely at home in the voices of the characters, it feels like they become mouthpieces to voice big philosophical ideas that he wants to explore. There's a. A scene in which Freya, of all people, returns to the stage as this suddenly overly poetic philosophical nightmare, seductress, witch, which, I'll be honest, sort of just rings a little false. And yet there's a lot of really tremendous writing for many of his other characters. I mean, so many of Billy's lines and her abruptness and her insistence on her own ideas and conversations and lifestyle is just fantastic. But also all of the unrequited passion between Lydia and Stephen is so beautifully explored, brilliantly played. The way in which Lydia, eventually, in the third act, offloads at Stephen, venting all of her frustrations and her anger at him because, simply because there is a road between them down which she can drive, a road that no longer exists between her and her husband, Dermot. That road is closed. He's made that much clear to her already. But between her and Steven, there is enough of a connection that the two of them can actually commit to a little bit of emotional honesty with each other, which there isn't a lot of going about in this family. As a writer, I think Conor McPherson's done a really fascinating job in sort of reincarnating the emotions of Uncle Vanya into these different characters, into these characters in 1980s Ireland. But as a director of his own work, I do feel as though we lack a certain amount of clarity. And it feels as though there are too many different ideas at play, perhaps one too many characters in the action, with a few I haven't even had the time to tell you about yet. There's a slightly bizarre plot point we find out about very early on, in which Dermot shares with his siblings that he had to take Lydia over to England in order to get an abortion. And this is all sort of very shocking, but disguised beneath a joke about him going to a cafe conference. And while the piece is certainly not a musical in the same way that Conor McPherson's previous projects have been, he does seem a little reliant on the use of music in order to conjure pathos and mystery in a way he doesn't seem to be able to with dialogue, it's fascinating what he can achieve in silence. But often that silence, or the lack of dialogue between characters is underscored with music or with song. The first act ends with this haunting performance at the piano as three different women each unhappy in their own way, silently go about clearing the table. Let's conclude then by talking a little about these performances. Emin Fitzgerald Doherty is very charming as the young Brendan. Sean McGinley gives a brilliantly comic performance as Uncle Pierre and his foolish single mindedness. Derbacherotty plays Pierre's perhaps sexually frustrated housekeeper Elizabeth, and Aisling Kearns plays the manipulative young Freya. But it's the performances of Hannah Morris as Lydia, as well as Chris O'Do, Brian Gleason and Rosie Sheehy as the three siblings that really shine here. Chris O'Dowd in his outrageous, unbelievable villainy, Brian Gleason in this melancholy that, you know, induces this misery in everyone around him, in this palpable frustration and these secrets he's determined to keep. Hannah Morris in her utterly spellbinding connection with him, in this impossible idea of the two of them together that's never going to be able to happen. But Rosie Sheehy, really remarkable, absolutely fantastic performance, the final moments of which are basically this stunning exclamation point on her entire character and really the entire idea of the play that prove it to have been cyclical in nature. We're back to where we started. We finally understand within a new, difficult context what she was talking about at the beginning. She's stuck in this monotonous life as everyone flees and saves themselves around her, and she seems resigned and doomed to a misery from which she can never escape. So, you know, really cheery stuff, but brilliant performances, a surprising number of laughs, some very interesting kinship to the world of Chekhov in its tone, in its themes, in parts of its structure. Worth going to see if you have any interest in that. I do have some serious question marks about its depictions of neurodivergent characters, but I also think it offers enough compelling character study to really make it worth seeing. And you know, in a world of of one person interpretations of Chekhov and updated versions of things, I think it's very interesting to see plays that seem more inspired by that are telling fresh stories with different characters and have one foot in that world, but are also bringing it into the modern age of playwriting. In any case, those have been my thoughts about the Brightening air currently playing at the Old Vic. Like I said, let me know in the comment section down below if you've seen this already what you thought of it. Make sure you're subscribed and or following me on podcast platforms if you want to hear more of my reviews coming very soon. And I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a stagey day. For 10 more seconds, I'm Mickey Jo Theater. Oh, my God. Hey, thanks for watching. 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