HOME AND FAMILY, BEAUTY AND SADNESS
Few days late to the party with this , poor old theatrecat having seemed to fall off the press list; but very well worth the ticket (Old Vic pricing is exemplary). It’s by Conor McPherson, whose 1930’s musical play round Dylan songs, “Girl from the North Country” will be more than welcome back this summer. This – with only odd musical fragments – has much of the same haunting and humane spirit, tuned to the poetry, absurdity, tragedy and beauty of hardscrabble lives. Echoes of Uncle Vanya have been much pointed at – country farmhouse, richer townie relative calling, money- talk threatening a serene resigned dullness, and 1980s Ireland not so different to Russia a century earlier.
But for me it felt far closer to JERUSALEM in tone, thought, and its memorable soliloquies.
Both exist in the wildlands between rough-cast lives and the edges of eternity: folklore and spirituality, bewildered needs and half-glimpsed otherworlds. Two siblings scruffily share the rundown family farmhouse: Brian Gleeson’ s weary resigned Stephen, and Billy , played with extraordinary conviction by Rosie Sheehy as a sibling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. She’s clever, but needs an eye kept on her, and is soothed by lists and categories (the play opens with her encyclopaedic lost of line changes from Limerick Junction to Varanasi) . She is at risk always of either disoriented explosions or lethally tactless statements of truth.
Lydia (Hannah Morrish) is married to the third sibling Dermot and , riven by his “wandering” and his new young woman, has left her children at home to make a special tea and cake at the old farmhouse for visit from Uncle Pierre, a retired, blind and not reputable old priest, and the housekeeper Elizabeth with whom he lives. Another sibling Dermot -who runs cafes – is driving him up: Chris O’Dowd plays quite beautifully as the ultimate prosperous eejit, absurdly preening, excusing his marital wandering withlines like “Its the 1980s! , free market out there! Let’s deregulate that momma!”. Accompanied by a young employee “assistant” Freya. Dermot is disconcerted to find Lydia laying out the sandwiches, sad and needy for his love. She has asked Stephen to get her water from a magical bogland spring as a love potion. Sean McGinley as ancient Pierre taps around with his white stick and repeatedly offers to say Mass.
His housekeeper Elizabeth was once an item with Stephen, whose resigned coping defeatism she clearly sees. Her life with the priest seems to be a relationship based on tin baths in the kitchen , tending a graphically nasty tumour or wound, and, as Stephen drily points out, the arrival of regular letters of remonstrance from the Vatican. The priest been banned from his overkeen delivering of the Last Rites.
The first half sets these people up and makes us exasperatedly or anxiously fond of them (that’s McPherson’s forte). The second heats and speeds up: no spoilers, but it may be that the ancient priest is both a spiritual and a financial menace, and that Dermot’s terrible behaviour is needy more than predatory, as he cries old adulterer’s “bigger than both of us” excuse that there are two roads but one can take him all the way to the moon. O’Dowd’s scene with Morrish is wrenching, outclassed only by Pierre’s visions and , when all is resolved about the farm, Billy’s great and moving prediction of how she and her brother will end.
Reading about it, I had quailed slighly at the fact that Billy is labelled as autistic, because I feared empty fashionabless. But no: dramatically the presence of a wild card, unclassifiable, eccentric but real , suddenly distressable, free from normal social responses and seeking comfort in lists and hard facts adds both comedy and poignancy to the interlocked family plot. A womderful line from her to Elizabeth, after the fox gets the family chickens in a thunderstorm, is that a person can be either a fox or a prize heifer. The heifer is tied to a stick, so everyone can walk roumd and prod and see all of her, no secrets, from bum and nose to udders. Whereas a fox rampages in the dark, unseen, not known. Which is better?
And a good irony is that it is Lydia and Stephen who are most used to her, easy with her strangeness, and it is they who are the most centred and sane . It is a remarkable play. Looking back, in the thoughtful mood it left me, it is odd to remember how many, many laughs there were in it. That’s an achievement that won the fifth mouse.
Oldvictheatre.com. To 14 June
Rating 5
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