Last Updated on April 25, 2025
Where myth and memory meet, Conor McPherson’s haunting Irish tale
3.5 out of 5.0 stars
There’s a moment, nestled deep within The Brightening Air, where the ordinary slips sideways into the otherworldly – and you feel it as surely as the curtain catching the wind in the play’s opening image. That curtain, rippling before a backdrop of softly hued landscape paintings, sets the tone: this is rural southern Ireland in the 1980s, yes, but also somewhere stranger. Somewhere older. Somewhere where magic might just be real – or at least real enough to wound you.
Conor McPherson’s latest play, and perhaps most tender offering, takes its title from W.B. Yeats’ The Song of Wandering Aengus, and it’s a title that encapsulates the play’s emotional core: that glowing, fleeting instant when dreams brush against reality before dissolving into dust. The Brightening Air is about that moment – and about the people who keep chasing it, knowing it may never come again.
We open on a simply dressed stage, designed with quiet eloquence by Rae Smith (also behind the naturalistic, time-worn costumes), and lit with dusky elegance by Mark Henderson. A worn wooden table, a scattering of mismatched chairs, a piano just off-centre. It feels lived in, perhaps even loved, and under McPherson’s gentle, intuitive direction, it becomes far more than a setting. The family home here is both shrine and trap, a vessel for memory, inheritance, and unspoken grief.
Brian Gleeson’s Stephen, powerful and utterly believable, tends to this crumbling relic of family life with quiet devotion. A bachelor clinging to ritual, he is an anchor in a storm of unresolved feeling. His sister Billie, astutely played by Rosie Sheehy, is all sharp edges and crackling intensity – more direct, blunt to the point of brilliance, her wit as fierce as her loyalty. There’s a suggestion of neurodivergence in her hyper-literal manner, though it’s never named, only felt, in the texture of her being.
Together, they are a curious, tenderly mismatched domestic unit. Not quite stuck, but not exactly moving either. Until the door opens. In walks Uncle Pierre, a blind ex-clergyman with an opaque history, played with mesmeric ambiguity by Seán McGinley. Pierre’s silky half-truths and veiled intentions bring a brush of folklore into the farmhouse air. He is attended by the housekeeper Elizabeth (a quietly compelling Derbhle Crotty), who offers Stephen a kind of physical intimacy that bypasses love – transactional, yes, but not unkind.
Tea is prepared by the patient Lydia, perfectly portrayed by Hannah Morrish, whose quiet yearning for magic, in the form of water from a legendary well that may make you fall in love with the first person you see upon awakening, sets the play’s emotional weather system in motion. She is still married to Dermot, played with swaggering brilliance by Chris O’Dowd, the prodigal brother, all charm and chaos. He returns to the family with Freya (Aisling Kearns) – a young woman, possibly a witch, perhaps a fairy, or simply the girl next door. Her presence is a riddle the play never quite solves.
Dermot’s arrival is the storm. He brings humour and that brand of devilish Irish charm – unsettling and irresistible – that only barely masks the deeper wounds he refuses to name. There is a touch of Shakespearean misrule here, as if A Midsummer Night’s Dream has drifted into a kitchen-sink drama: love potions, identity confusions, heartbreaks that feel older than the people experiencing them.
McPherson’s great skill, as ever, lies in the way he weaves the natural and the supernatural so seamlessly that the edges blur beyond recognition. Did the well truly work? In some ways, yes – but its potency lies in the uncertainty it casts, the shimmering ambiguity between belief and illusion. What remains unquestionably real, pulsing beneath the folklore, is grief and longing, raw and enduring.
Gregory Clarke’s score for The Brightening Air, cloaked in plaintive Irish folk, pulses through the play like an emotional undercurrent – never intrusive, always truthful. Music becomes memory here, as much as a narrative device. It softens the edges of reality, just as the characters blur the borders between myth and the mundane.
And therein lies the beauty of The Brightening Air: it understands that the greatest magic is often the most human. Stephen’s long-suppressed love for Lydia, who, despite fleeting moments of hope, remains tantalisingly out of reach, is as heartbreaking as it is restrained. Billie’s fierce protectiveness, Dermot’s nihilistic magnetism, even Uncle Pierre’s selfish scheming, all trace back to the same truth: we are each of us reaching for something that probably isn’t real, but might be, if only we dare believe in it.
Even the smaller roles resonate. Farmhand Brendan (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) harbours a quiet desire for a deeper connection with Billie – an affection that goes unacknowledged, unnoticed. Like so much in this play, it is the ache that matters more than any resolution.
The Brightening Air is not without its imperfections. The mystery of narrative, especially at its end, does at times frustrate. But perhaps that’s the point. This is a play less concerned with answers than atmosphere, less with plot than poetry. As the final scene fades and that curtain stirs once more, you’re left not with closure, but with the feeling that something ancient has passed through you – or perhaps, that you’ve passed through it. Either way, McPherson has conjured a tale in The Brightening Air that lingers in the air, long after the lights come up.
Until 14 Jun 2025
The Brightening Air
The Old Vic,
103 The Cut,
London SE1 8NB
0344 871 7628
https://www.oldvictheatre.com
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