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A masterpiece from a superb dramatist
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BRUTAL PERSONIFICATION: Rosie Sheehy (Billie) and Hannah Morrish (Lydia) in The Brightening Air / Pic: Manuel Harlan
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The Brightening Air
Old Vic, London
★★★★★
THIS brand-new drama by Conor McPherson is long-awaited. His last original play, set in Minnesota, was the acclaimed Girl from the North Country written as a favour to Bob Dylan. Now he returns to rural Ireland in the 1980s, where he plunders the land of his birth for the visceral detail of life as lived beyond the public eye. And it’s magnificent.
The title, The Brightening Air, is a direct quote from Yeats and captures the moment when our magical dreams hit the light of reality. The play treads a mystical path through its people’s concrete lives into their hopes and unconscious longings, and thence to a kind of purpose.
And language is only one of its tools, for The Brightening Air uncovers truths about human existence that defy the approximation of words and reveal our own innate inability ever truly to know ourselves or what we’re for.
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