The veil separating the mystical from the mundane, the numinous from the normal is very thin in Conor McPherson’s strange new comedy-drama The Brightening Air.
It’s 1981 and siblings Billie (Rosie Sheehy) and Stephen (Brian Gleeson) live together on the ramshackle County Sligo farm they inherited from their father. A visit from their Uncle Pierre (Seán McGinley), who is a blind former priest, and his housekeeper Elizabeth (Derbhle Crotty), and their narcissistic older brother Dermot (Chris O’Dowd) and his much younger girlfriend Freya (Aisling Kearns) is about to change their lives. Meanwhile, Dermot’s abandoned wife Lydia (Hannah Morrish) is plotting to win him back, with the help of some water from an enchanted well, and barman and occasional farmhand Brendan (Eimhin Fitzgerald Doherty) has designs on Billie.
All the action takes place in the farmhouse, represented by some scattered furniture, a piano and a dining table that is constantly being moved around. The family and their wider circle bicker and fall out and make up again. There is much eating and strong drink is taken. Relationships begin and end. There are revelations and reckonings and, possibly, a miracle.
It seems rich in allusion and significance but as soon as you reach for the meaning, it vanishes
McPherson directs as well as writes. Sheehy is tremendous as the eccentric and probably neurodivergent Billie. Her current obsession is rail networks. It used to be paint and, before that, chimpanzees. Gleeson is convincing as the embittered Stephen who sees life slipping away as he stays in this nowhere place, looking after Billie (she’s been knocked down by lorries three times). O’Dowd demonstrates brilliant comic timing as the feckless, faithless older brother. A pertinent ad-lib about the Pope got a big laugh. This is a very funny play and completely engrossing.
The Brightening Air’s rural family reunion echoes Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya which McPherson adapted in 2020 for a West End production. Several times in the play, there is dialogue that recalls Waiting For Godot’s “Nobody comes. Nobody goes.” and there’s a general air of Beckettian absurdity. There’s also a whiff of the celebrated sitcom Father Ted.
The title, meanwhile, is taken from W. B. Yeats’s poem The Song of Wandering Aengus in which a man who catches a fish that turns into a beautiful woman before disappearing spends the rest of his life searching for her.
At intervals we see shadow play figures on diaphanous screens — veils — at the back of the stage and there are a couple of incongruous musical interludes, adding to the play’s mysterious quality. It seems rich in allusion, symbolism and significance but as soon as you reach for the meaning, it vanishes, like the girl in Yeats’s poem, into the brightening air. It cast a spell on me.
There’s not much of the numinous about Robert Icke’s Manhunt at the Royal Court. This is the play about Raoul Moat that absolutely no-one was asking for. Moat, you will recall, was the 37-year-old former bouncer who, after being released from Durham prison in 2010, shot his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, killed her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and blinded PC David Rathband by shooting him in the face before going on the run for a week, prompting a huge police manhunt. Moat, who had hid out near Rothbury in Northumberland, ended up shooting himself after a standoff with the police. Thousands of idiots on social media hailed him as a “legend” but Prime Minister David Cameron said: “It is absolutely clear that Raoul Moat was a callous murderer, full stop, end of story.”
That was that so far as most of us were concerned but Icke, whose Oedipus was a huge West End success recently, was intrigued. Where had Moat’s rage come from? What turned him into a callous murderer? Hence this piece, written and directed by Icke. It is partly based on hours of recordings made by Moat in various meetings with social services and the police and while hiding out, and partly based on the journalist Andrew Hankinson’s book You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life: You Are Raoul Moat. According to Icke, most of Moat’s dialogue in the play is a version of something he actually said.
The show is framed as Moat accounting for his actions in a trial that, obviously, never happened in real life. Samuel Edward-Cook gives an astonishing performance as the killer. He’s a muscle-bound, shaven-headed, self-pitying volcano of rage. He explodes into violence, throwing furniture, people across the stage. And although the text gives some explanation for his delinquency — a traumatic childhood, perceived police persecution, unanswered cries for help — it doesn’t attempt to excuse it. Sue Sim, the now retired chief constable who led the hunt for Moat, recently chimed in to voice her concern that the play could be considered “titillation”. She can’t have seen it.
The sound design by Tom Gibbons is hugely effective in ratcheting up the tension — there’s a particularly effective sequence that plays out to the Northern Soul classic The Night by Franki Valli and The Four Seasons. A long monologue by the blinded Rathband, who took his own life in 2012, takes place with the theatre in total darkness and is particularly powerful. No-one leaves this play thinking Moat was “a legend”.
Everyone remembers that former footballer Paul Gascoigne, off his face on cocaine and bearing a fishing rod, some chicken and four cans of lager, turned up in Rothbury to offer his services as a mediator. The police, naturally, sent him packing but here Gazza, played by Trevor Fox, is depicted as meeting Moat. They discuss masculinity in an oddly moving exchange. But the overwhelming feeling one is left with when the play ends is of revulsion. “He’s a monster,” Samantha Stobbart’s mother tells her at one point. It’s hard to disagree.
The Brightening Air is at www.oldvictheatre.com until 14 June
Manhunt is at royalcourttheatre.com until 3 May
