Aristocrats

by Brian Friel

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 30 August 2018

Lyndsey Turner directs this revival of Brian Friel's 1979 play about the decaying O'Donnell family, unusually Roman Catholic denizens of a 'Big House' in Ballybeg, County Donegal (most 'Big Houses' belonged to Anglo Protestants).

The house has seen better times - repairs are outstanding and there is virtually no money to keep it going - and the family in the 1970s is not what it was either, having descended from Chief Justice to sausage factory worker in four generations. The senescent father (James Laurenson), principally present to us through his rambling diatribes overheard through a baby monitor, still holds sway over Judith (Eileen Walsh), the daughter dutifully caring for him, and can still strike terror into is wayward son Casimir (David Dawson) when he is visiting from Hamburg, but he seems to have less effect on Alice (Elaine Cassidy) visiting with her husband Eamon (Emmet Kirwan) from London, and the youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus) still living at home but about to be married.

The family has in fact gathered for Claire's wedding, but Tom Hoffnung (Paul Higgins), an American academic, is also ferreting around the house and taking notes about family anecdotes as part of a research project. The situation is thus ripe both for peculiar revelations and for some sociological theorising and analysis, and at times both seem a little forced. However, it is not so much that there are skeletons in the closet (as might be expected from the dramatic set-up), but rather that the siblings - apart perhaps from the determinedly practical Judith - are deeply strange people: Alice losing herself to drink because her marriage has soured, Claire veering between the highs and lows of manic depression, and Casimir holding himself together with inexhaustible nervous energy. When Eamon remarks to Tom that the family half believe that Casimir's German wife and three boys are a figment of his imagination we are left forever unsure of how to take anything that Casimir says, and his palpable shock when Tom presents him with incontrovertible evidence that one of his family memories is impossible only strengthens the impression that he is lost in daydreams.

Though there are weirdly comic moments, much of what we see instils an atmosphere of debility and even despair; the similarity to Chekhovian ennui is increasingly obvious, reinforced by the country house setting, the faded gentility of the family, and the eventual collapse of the means to keep the whole enterprise going. But the style of this particular production makes it hard to grasp the tone of the piece, with the result that it takes more time than it should to settle into the world we are witnessing. Rather than creating a realistic setting, Turner and designer Es Devlin have designed an almost featureless pale pastel green acting space with a model of a house standing in for the real thing, and stage directions at the beginning of each act read out to set the scene. Where such a model was a powerful symbol in The Inheritance here it looks a little contrived, and the constant presence of the cast hovering in the background when not required to be on stage, so masterfully effective in Matthew Lopez's play, here makes the action more difficult to follow.

This is a pity, because the individual performances are often very good, and David Dawson in particular is brilliant as Casimir; and the concluding mixture of melancholy and hope is quietly affecting.