Brian Friel’s semi-autobiographical play, set in 1936 in the Ireland of his boyhood, features five unmarried sisters based on his mother and aunts. At first it seems like an exercise in sepia-tinted nostalgia. There is a postcard-style vista of the hills of Donegal at the back, softened by a fringe so the mise-en-scene appears to be the stuff of fuzzy, soft-focus memory.
In front is a house where seven-year-old Michael plays while his mother, Chris (Alison Oliver), and aunts bicker, stew over the past and bake soda bread. The child is emphatically invisible, the women kissing thin air as they reach for him. An adult counterpart (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) speaks his words instead or describes the ways things were, back then, when he was a boy.
But Friel’s 1990 drama is an exploration of nostalgia itself rather than a reflection of it – the way we choose to reconstruct the past. It is a finely crafted memory play, beautifully realised by director Josie Rourke. Michael narrates his memories, smoothing their sides, while Uncle Jack (Ardal O’Hanlon), just back from Africa, has forgotten all of his and the women are helping him remember.
Larger themes are nestled in the domestic dialogue: a new Ireland is closing in on this rural backwater, with threats to the church crystallised in Kate’s (Justine Mitchell) anxieties over back-hills pagans and Jack’s spirituality, imported from Uganda. The Industrial Revolution has arrived too, driving Agnes (Louisa Harland) and Maggie’s (Siobhán McSweeney) glove-knitting business into the ground and there is the distant rumble of the Spanish civil war to which Michael’s bumbling father, Gerry (Tom Riley), has enlisted.
That sense of encroaching forces outside the home, and the stasis within, lends the play its Chekhovian strains. While ostensibly unstructured, it is carefully plotted to build tensions and show the small tragedies between these sisters, all within the bounds of everyday domesticity. Friel’s artful blend of nothing and everything happening at once is finely calibrated here and each movement, and facial expression, becomes meaningful.
The performances are exquisite too, from Oliver’s fluttering exhilaration when Gerry first arrives to the house, to Jack’s passion for the alternative faith he has brought back to Donegal. McSweeney is a quiet tour de force as the sister who was born to entertain and who creates her own little performances in this space.
Movement lies at the emotional heart of this play and it is orchestrated with such delicate mastery by Wayne McGregor that the stomping scene, featuring the sisters dancing with wild abandon is a shared hedonistic escape, rebellious ritual and act of worship in one.
At the Olivier theatre, National Theatre, London, until 27 May
