CHARMED LIVES

Magic, faith and family secrets come to light in an old Irish farmhouse in Conor McPherson’s play ‘The Brightening Air’

- ALICE SAVILLE

Only the thinnest of lines separates ordinary life and the mystic realm in Conor McPherson’s intriguing new play. His previous show at the Old Vic was the sprawling, Bob Dylan-song-filled Girl From the North Country. Here, he’s pared things back to focus on a family wrestling with life, faith and fate in a damp old Irish farmhouse.

Rosie Sheehy gives a luminous performance as Billie, the chirping, awkward truth-teller at the centre of this clan. She’s been reading up on Eastern philosophy and reckons that having your body ritually set on fire is the only way to escape life’s eternal loops. Certainly, her existence seems pretty purgatorial, living among the dust and spiders of the ancestral home with her brother Stephen, played with stoic bluntness by Brian Gleeson.