The playwright on his first new play in 12 years, The Brightening Air — and reviving the Bob Dylan musical that made the musician weep
Conor McPherson has had some huge theatrical hits — his ghostly breakthrough, The Weir; his Bob Dylan musical, Girl from the North Country — but there is one play that got away. It was early 2020, and the Dublin-born playwright was on Broadway directing his Dylan show. Meanwhile a West End cast including Toby Jones and Aimee Lou Wood were performing his artfully contemporary translation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, including — a first for this great tragicomedy — characters who apologised for “wanging on”.
He had been planning to catch up with Vanya once the musical was up and running in New York. But, well, no need to remind you why both shows ended up closing in March 2020. Vanya was later filmed and the Dylan musical reopened — and indeed is returning to its birthplace at the Old Vic in London this summer. But McPherson missed seeing in the flesh his version of Chekhov’s four-act play set in a large family home in turn-of-the-century rural Russia.
So now he has written his own four-act play set in a large family home. Not that The Brightening Air, his first new straight play in 12 years, is an Uncle Vanya knock-off exactly. “It’s like a distant Irish relative,” he says, “as opposed to an adaptation. But I had some sort of ghostly unfinished business with Chekhov.”…