Reviews of The Brightening Air at The Old Vic starring Chris O’Dowd

"The Brightening Air is the finest play of the year"

"Chris O'Dowd leads a magnificent cast in a rich and subtle play that will surely endure for decades"

"If 2025 sees a finer or more accomplished piece of playwriting, I will be very surprised. It would be no hyperbole to state that this is the English language answer to Chekhov; The Brightening Air, with its themes of lost love and missed opportunity, is a piece of drama that is surely going to endure down the decades, gaining in richness and resonance with each new revival."

"I am usually highly sceptical of writers who direct their own work, as this lack of an outside perspective tends to end badly. McPherson, however, is the exception that proves the rule, tenderly affording his play a fiercely accomplished production that brings out all of its melancholy richness."

"The eight-strong ensemble is, quite simply, magnificent, as humour bubbles amidst the mounting family tension... Best of all, however, is the astonishing Sheehy."

"This all blends into the most rich, textured and subtle evening of theatre."

"Chekhov meets Lovecraft in Conor McPherson’s excellent first new play in 12 years"

"It’s a slow, wistful start, the dial firmly tuned to ‘Chekhov’."

"McPherson probably has a couple more characters than he strictly speaking needs here, but it’s still deft stuff, a slow-burn, bittersweet drama about a family finally disintegrating under forces that have been pulling at it for decades."

"In fact the second half is gloriously strange even by McPherson’s standards. Rather than the family wistfully fading away Uncle Vanya-style, they seem to have rather been sucked through some sinister rupture in reality."

"McPherson’s great gift is how he’s able to integrate this stuff into his storytelling, how you’d never say the moments of out-and-out strangeness are actually the point of his plays. Indeed, the heart of The Brightening Air remains Sheehy’s tough but intensely vulnerable Billie"

"Big name O’Dowd is also on fine form: he’s impressively ghastly as the brittle, condescending Dermot, whose relative financial success and string of younger lovers doesn’t seem to have made him even slightly happy."

"This slice of 1980s Irish life is hilarious and achingly moving"

"Conor McPherson is a singular writer and a phenomenal director"

"Audacious. That’s the word for Conor McPherson’s new play, a hilarious and achingly moving slice of dysfunctional rural Irish family life in the 1980s with broad seams of mysticism and superstition running through it. McPherson himself skillfully directs a splendid ensemble from which two names have to be singled out."

"... Chris O’Dowd returns to the stage for the first time in four years with a heroically detestable performance as the tauntingly feckless, faithless Dermot. And Rosie Sheehy adds to her unbroken run of transfixingly vivid roles as his sister Billie"

"... McPherson is a truly singular writer, who is always probing the boundaries of mood and genre. The biggest ghost haunting this show is him."

"McPherson is a phenomenal director of actors. The leaps the takes as a writer into the numinous here won’t be to everyone’s taste but I bloody loved it."

"A rich family drama with echoes of Chekhov"

"Chris O’Dowd and Rosie Sheehy are standout performers in Conor McPherson’s play at London’s Old Vic"

"There are traces of Brian Friel and other great Irish dramatists here, too, and the play’s title comes from a Yeats poem. But the style is very much McPherson’s own: earthy realism flecked with folklore and religion."

"It makes for a packed drama and McPherson doesn’t quite pull all the threads together. But it’s best to roll with the pace, savour the pithy, witty dialogue, and relish the performances, which are excellent."

"In a beautifully weighted ensemble, Chris O’Dowd is super as the loudly self-pitying Dermot, counterweighted by Brian Gleeson’s Stephen"

"Best of all is Rosie Sheehy, outstanding as Billie, whose frankness makes her both vulnerable and insightful, and who is, like Chekhov’s Sonia, the anchor of the play."

"Rosie Sheehy confirms her star status in this terrific Chekhovian drama"

"Conor McPherson’s new play is a haunting and very funny ensemble piece, with a superb ensemble cast that includes Chris O’Dowd"

"O’Dowd may be the star turn here but the standout performance in this eight-strong ensemble piece is Sheehy. The other actors are uniformly superb in a play that is by turns, convulsively funny, bleak and puzzling but it’s Sheehy that my eyes kept seeking out among the bodies on stage – she channels Billie (bolshy and, to a modern audience, neurodivergent) so convincingly and with perfect comic timing."

"A major part of the success of this play is driven by its atmosphere, a kind of non-human character essential to highlighting its central enquiry of what home means, what it contains and how it morphs."

"This isn’t a standard family drama ticking off plot points, elaborating on character motivations or playing for laughs – even though it is very funny."

"... its haunting imagery will stay with you for a long time."

"Loaded with humour and profundity"

"Conor McPherson’s elegiac examination of faith and desire shines"

"In 2020, celebrated Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s adaptation of Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre closed prematurely due to Covid. This enthralling, bittersweet comedy-drama feels like a companion piece of sorts, a richly observed study of a family of quirky misfits imploding under the weight of their unattainable desires."

"Although the piece is profoundly slow-moving, it remains gripping thanks to McPherson’s typically sparkling dialogue, dripping with vibrant Irish idiom and loaded with humour and profundity."

"The production benefits from a charismatic ensemble cast and a poignant performance by Hannah Morrish as exhausted, unhappily married Lydia.

"But it is Rosie Sheehy – recently nominated for an Olivier award for her shattering performance in Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal – who gives the production’s standout performance as younger sister Billie."

"Chris O’Dowd should do more theatre"

"The Irish actor is a joy in Conor McPherson’s play about three siblings clinging on to a family farmhouse in 1980s Ireland"

"It’s sharp, it’s tender, its every deft exchange is handled exquisitely by a cast led by Rosie Sheehy, Chris O’Dowd and Brian Gleeson. I enjoyed it very much. It didn’t creep up on me, though. Is it ever dull? No. Is it greater than the sum of parts openly influenced by Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya? Again no."

"Nothing rings false in McPherson’s delicious dialogue, except for the overall shape of the storytelling. He directs too: would an outside voice have called for some tidying up?"

"The mixture of the mundane and the miraculous is deliberate, but the cures and curses of the second half are rushed. Wildly well though Sheehy performs the big closing speech, it feels like good writing, not real life. And yet I recommend The Brightening Air even so. I’m not sure it quite adds up, but it’s far more interesting than plenty of plays that do."

"Shades of Vanya as a Sligo family squabble, tease and wrestle"

"Terrific performances from Chris O’Dowd and Rosie Sheehy lead a populous family drama hinging on a broken-down country farmhouse"

"Individually, each influence is valid and every idea is a good one but together the play seems to swing on its hinges, like this family’s clapped out farm-door."

"The pace is too easy in the first half, as the flotsam and jetsam of family life float by. There is a good Chekhovian mix of melancholy and humour in the cross-conversational currents between family members, but it all needs more momentum and emotional drive. The second half brings more intensity but also a plot that feels stretched to aburdism"

"Still, there are heaps of charm and a few searing moments."

"An incredibly strong cast is gathered: O’Dowd is a delight as the family’s self-regarding eldest brother and Sheehy, as always, is a standout force. She plays a largely comic character but infuses Billie with great emotion."

"Chris O’Dowd is entertainingly roguish as a walking midlife crisis in The Brightening Air"

"Magic, faith, and family secrets come to light in an old Irish farmhouse"

"Only the thinnest of lines separate ordinary life and the mystic realms in Conor McPherson’s intriguing new play."

"Rosie Sheehy gives a luminous performance as Billie, the chirping, awkward truth-teller at the centre of this clan."

"McPherson has chosen a pretty classic, robust dramatic set-up here – a family returning to a house that’s cobwebbed over with uncomfortable memories, thrashing out their differences over tea and whiskey, unearthing old secrets. Still, somehow the plot of The Brightening Air never takes a definitive shape. A stronger director could have done more to address its often-faltering pace and wayward structure, but here McPherson takes the reins of his own play with a loose hand"

"The real magic here comes from the beautifully woven speeches McPherson gives his characters as they rebel against tedium, death, and the heavens."

"... McPherson’s play is more jagged, more strange, and more flawed than those greats – a furious middle-finger held up against the unforgiving, rainy grey heavens."

"The Brightening Air owes many debts in many directions, but most particularly to Brian Friel, WB Yeats (from whose poem “The Song of Wandering Aengus” the title is taken) and Chekhov, whose Uncle Vanya McPherson adapted in 2020. But it also has its own character, a sense of suspended animation emphasised by Rae Smith’s design"

"Fitfully, The Brightening Air is utterly wondrous. The first two acts of its four-act structure are beautifully atmospheric, dancing a clever line between comedy and melancholy, realism and magic."

"McPherson’s writing is pin-sharp, a rare combination of the riotous and the elegiac.... But he simply tries to cram too much in."

"Yet The Brightening Air is constantly gripping, elevated by commanding performances from the entire cast, both finely detailed and yet somehow soaring. O’Dowd is superb as Doherty"

"Sheehy is utterly devastating. Her resilience owes something to Sonia in Uncle Vanya, but Sheehy adds a layer of vulnerability that is completely compelling."

"Among a family in the countryside, pain is slowly, humorously unrolled. This is a rich tumble of an evening. More crammed and less evenly paced than McPherson’s glorious ballad to Dylan, Girl from the North Country (which returns to the Old Vic this summer), it is both realistic and woozy"

"Chris O’Dowd’s disruptive scapegrace is beautifully judged. Hannah Morrish and Brian Gleeson are wistful and alluring in the difficult roles of people both warm and desolate. Still, the splendour of the evening is Rosie Sheehy. She has amazed me ever since I saw her seven years ago playing a sullen teenager in The Whale. Every time she appears on stage – as a football player in The Wolves, a crushed wife in Machinal – she moves up a notch, transforming not only herself but her possibilities."

"Sheehy’s originality makes an evocative play unmissable. Here is proof that a playwright’s adapting and reacting may indeed bring a brightening."