Imagine an old farmhouse in County Sligo where family resentments simmer beside rumours of miracles. That is the spine of The Brightening Air, Conor McPherson’s first new play in more than a decade, now filling the Old Vic with dread and the tang of peat smoke. You sit down expecting domestic comedy; two hours later you leave wondering whether you have witnessed a haunting disguised as a reunion.
McPherson both writes and directs. After years spent on adaptations and a Bob Dylan musical, he returns to the territory that made his name: Irish folk tale meeting modern disillusion. The title, borrowed from Yeats, signals that poetry and myth will seep through the cracked plaster. Rae Smith’s design shows broken chairs, a dusty piano and gauzy screens printed with ghostly trees.
The story unfurls quietly. Dermot, the eldest brother, bursts back into the farm clutching a bottle and a teenage girlfriend named Freya. He has not warned his dutiful wife Lydia. Stephen, the middle brother who has sacrificed youth to keep the land alive, greets Dermot with tight smiles that reek of envy. Billie, their sister, circles the piano reciting railway timetables and muttering to the hens she accidentally freed. Into this gathering comes Uncle Pierre, a blind former priest staking a claim to the property. At first you settle into a familiar Chekhovian rhythm of jokes, slights and longing glances. Then whispers of folklore creep in. Lydia begs for water from a local holy spring said to bend hearts, Billie converses with unseen ancestors and Pierre begins to prophesy that sight will return to his ruined eyes.
Performances ground the magic. Chris O’Dowd gives Dermot a swagger that curdles into panic once the room turns against him. He tosses an empty laugh over his shoulder yet lets you glimpse the hollow where dignity ought to be. Brian Gleeson’s Stephen is all clenched jaw and cigarette ash; when Lydia brushes his fingers you feel twenty years of unvoiced longing. Rosie Sheehy’s Billie is astonishing. She never sentimentalistes the character, instead shifting from fierce certainty to wide eyed dread in a heartbeat. Sheehy’s physical precision — the compulsive pacing, the sudden stillness when order returns — makes Billie the play’s moral compass, jolting you whenever truth needs stating. As Uncle Pierre, Seán McGinley moves from gentle abstraction to fiery conviction, his sudden sermon on judgement night sending a chill through the stalls. Hannah Morrish invests Lydia with bruised grace, while Aisling Kearns charts Freya’s eerie evolution from gauche tagalong to something almost elemental.
Themes speak sharply to today. You watch Stephen buckle under unpaid caring, Dermot chase wealth that tastes of dust, Lydia risk humiliation for love, Billie fight to keep her safe space. Their dilemmas echo current debates on duty, economic migration and neurodiversity. The farm becomes a country caught between church lore and the cash rush that followed the eighties. You may hear faint notes of Succession in the siblings’ cut throat banter, or of McPherson’s own The Weir whenever a ghost story opens a trapdoor in the floor. Gabriel Garcia Marquez hovers, too; reality softens just enough for wonder to seep through the cracks.
The language is salty but not cruel, the content mature but rarely graphic. If you crave instant plot you may fidget during the leisurely first movement, yet patience is in part rewarded once the uncanny floodgates open.
Smith’s costumes pin everyone firmly in nineteen eighty one: Dermot’s city blazer, Stephen’s frayed knitwear, Freya’s neon shell suit. Each garment signals status and shifting power. When Dermot ends up in his father’s old jacket you read both defeat and rebirth. The battered piano echoes Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, letting music lift mundane life; a chipped bucket of holy water calls to mind Garcia Marquez and his mingling of faith and decay.
Though you hear whispers of Uncle Vanya, the play never feels borrowed. McPherson braids Chekhov, folklore and rueful Celtic humour into something entirely his own.