The acclaimed Irish playwright Conor McPherson's last original straight play was in 2013, and so the opening of "The Brightening Air", which returns him as writer-director to the Old Vic (where his acclaimed Bob Dylan musical "Girl from the North Country" premiered in 2017), feels like a "major theatrical event", said Dzifa Benson in The Daily Telegraph. Haunting and very funny, it is set in rural Sligo in the early 1980s, where Stephen (Brian Gleeson) and his sister Billie (Rosie Sheehy) still live in their crumbling family home, and seem likely to die there until relations arrive to disrupt their "self-made rut".
The play, which has (acknowledged) echoes of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya", veers into the numinous and the supernatural, said Nick Curtis in The London Standard. There's "a religious revelation, an apparent miracle and the smiting of the unworthy. There's even a cosmic joke at the end." It may not be to all tastes, but I "bloody loved it".
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