Culture

The Brightening Air — Conor McPherson's new play brings shadows of the Irish past to life

Chris O'Dowd (image by Manuel Harlan)

ON THE eve of his latest world premiere, the award-winning writer and director Conor McPherson talks to Ria Higgins about the themes which continue to inspire him

Conor McPherson (image by Manuel Harlan)

CONOR McPherson was barely in his 20s when he wrote The Weir. The play opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997, transferred to the West End in 1998 and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 1999. It was hailed a modern masterpiece. Another dozen or so successful plays followed, and he has never looked back. Today, McPherson is regarded by many as Ireland’s finest living playwright.

Next month sees the world premiere of his latest work The Brightening Air, and I was lucky enough to spend a morning with him just a couple of weeks before the opening at The Old Vic. The cast, which includes Chris O’Dowd and Brian Gleeson, were in the rehearsal room next door and there was a palpable sense of expectation in the air.

The theme of the play is all too familiar… family.

“The setting is an old family home in County Sligo,” McPherson explains, sipping on green tea, “where two siblings, a brother and a sister, still live. The house is falling apart, and it opens with the return of a third sibling who lives elsewhere. He’s the only one who got married and had kids, but unbeknown to the other two, he’s in a crisis. At the same time, their uncle turns up to pay them a visit. He lived in the house many years ago but left to become a priest. He arrives with his housekeeper and, as we find out, he’s been ex-communicated.”

Like many of his other plays, McPherson quickly introduces us to a compact melting pot of well-drawn characters with skewed personalities and juicy backstories, all waiting to spill out onto the stage.

You can’t help but wonder if his own family has provided at least some of the inspiration. McPherson has two siblings, an older sister and a younger sister, and a large extended family. His mother was one of 12 so if they all got married, that’s 22 uncles and aunts on just one side of the family, not to mention the cousins.

“Growing up, we had loads of big family get-togethers,” he recalls. “We were all very much in each other’s lives. The wonderful thing about uncles and aunts, of course, is they have all this authority, but no responsibility, so they let you do stuff, they spoil you. At the same time, they are individuals, and over time you get to know what’s going on in their lives.”

But there’s one more vital ingredient for this play and it’s one McPherson is no stranger to. Fairies. A word that has two very different meanings depending on where you come from.

“In Britain, ‘fairies’ conjure up this image of beautiful butterfly-like creatures that children read about in fairytales,” he explains. “In Ireland, it’s different. Fairies, along with the ancient fairielore that surrounds them, often feel much darker.”

It is a subject which McPherson first explored in that breakthrough play, The Weir. The setting was a small Irish rural pub where a few of the regulars gather to welcome a newcomer to the area. Bar banter takes an unexpected turn as chilling ghost stories and painful memories are interwoven with tales of ancient fairie roads. Now, it’s one of these ancient creatures which has inspired the title of his new play.

“The title is a quote from a W. B. Yeats’ poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus. It’s about a boy who catches a fish, which appears to turn into a girl who calls out his name. But she then disappears through ‘the brightening air’ and from that moment on, he spends the rest of his life trying to find her again. The title just feels like that moment when morning is coming, dreams are fading away… and reality returns.

“For me, these Irish fairies are not necessarily ‘good’ and they sometimes come with karmic retribution.”

And McPherson’s audiences love nothing better than an unsettling slice of karmic retribution.

“I just think it’s important to examine this ancient oral tradition. These stories are often about things that people experienced many years ago. Now, maybe they did experience them, maybe they didn’t. Maybe they were dreaming… maybe they were on drugs, who knows. But there’s something about a buried Irish religion that has been subsumed into folklore, strange beings and the landscape they inhabited.

“It also speaks to a kind of supressed culture,” he continues, “that was colonised and brutalised and genocided. And nearly lost its language. Of course, these traumatic things happened in other parts of the world, and they’re still happening today, but I’m fascinated by that time in Ireland’s history.”

You’ve only got to look at a monument like New Grange, which is older than the pyramids, to recognise that. These people were not only in tune with the landscape, but in tune with the Sun, the Moon and the stars. They had a cosmological awareness and, perhaps, a different understanding of life and death.”

You get the impression that McPherson is constantly searching for answers to our existence. You also get the impression that he’s a serious reader… everything from politics and current affairs to science and language. And yet he always finds plenty of time to listen to music, which would explain the huge success of his first musical, Girl from the North Country. It was set to Bob Dylan songs – only the second time Dylan’s music has been used in this way – and had its world premiere at the Old Vic in 2017.

It’s no surprise to learn that when McPherson was a young boy, he dreamed about becoming a musician. Born in Raheny, a suburb of north Dublin, he also grew up and went to school there. Surprisingly, school was his least favourite place.

“I wasn’t very good at school for some reason. I couldn’t click into the whole thing. I don’t know what it was, I just wasn’t interested in pretty much most of what they were teaching.”

Such was his lack of interest in anything other than music that he told his parents he was leaving school at 16. Mum and Dad fretted, worried that if his musical dream didn’t work out, he’d have nothing to fall back on. They were keen for him to go on to college, if only to give him time to grow up a bit.

“Luckily,” he laughs, “I managed to scrape together just enough points in my school exams to apply.”

McPherson got into University College Dublin to do an arts degree, choosing English, psychology and philosophy. He openly admits he only included the latter because, “I didn’t really know what philosophy was and it looked like an easy option. It seemed like a load of waffle!”

How wrong he was.

“Philosophy fascinated me. Firstly, because it meant we were talking about life and death and what’s really going on. Secondly, no matter where you go or who you talk to, it confirms that nobody really does know what’s going on! I loved it so much that I ended up doing a postgrad degree in it.”

This seems like a good point to bring up religion. Clearly, McPherson wasn’t raised in a household of daily churchgoers.

“I wasn’t from a religious family but, when I was growing up, nearly every kid went to a Catholic school and had a religions education. I don’t think I knew anyone who was genuinely religious... like nobody. I never met anyone who spoke about it as if they really believed in it.”

Both McPherson’s parents were from Dublin: his mother’s family were traders on Moor Street; his father’s father was a prison officer at Mountjoy Prison. His parents met in the city and got married in the late 1960s. McPherson came along in 1971.

“My parents weren’t what I’d describe as ‘old Irish’ in their outlook. My dad looked towards Britain and tended to listen to the BBC, rather than the Irish state radio. He loved classical music and read a lot – including many plays – so there were always books in the house. Books and music. Mum’s favourite singer was Karen Carpenter.” I had access to all these things.”

But it was while he was writing essays about great philosophers that he joined the college drama society and got his first taste of playwrighting. He was hooked. By the end of college, a group of them had formed a small theatre company and now they all faced the uphill struggle of trying to put on their plays while earning money at the same time.

Unlike poor wandering Aengus, however, McPherson didn’t spend the rest of his youth searching for the unsearchable – as many playwrights do. In 1995, shortly, after leaving college, he manged to get one of his first plays, The Lime Tree Bower, accepted by a theatre festival in Dublin. Just by chance, or not – depending on your philosophical outlook – a literary agent from London happened to be in the audience.

“He saw the play and I met him in a pub across the road afterwards. He said he thought he could get the play on in London and, the following year, we went to the Bush Theatre in Shepherd’s Bush. The funny thing is, The Royal Court in Sloane Square also wanted to put the play on but commissioned me to write another play instead. That was The Weir.

When he looks back at that time in his life, he can’t believe success came to him at such a young age.

“When you’re younger, you do things unselfconsciously. I wrote The Weir in two weeks. It was a handwritten first draft and I paid my younger sister £100 to type it up on her electric typewriter. It was that first draft which appeared on stage, and it’s never changed since.

“This latest play has taken me two years to write. We’re about to open… and I’m still rewriting it!”

The Brightening Air is at The Old Vic from 10 April to 14 June 2025. Oldvictheatre.com.

The Weir to here — Conor McPherson’s The Brightening Air

1971: Born in Raheny, suburb of Dublin

1988: Gets a place at University College Dublin.

1990: Joins the college Drama Society.

1991: Gets a double first degree in English and Philosophy at University College Dublin

1992: His very first play Rum and Vodka is staged at UCD.

1992: Completes a Masters in philosophy at University College Dublin

1995: The Lime Bower is performed at the Crypt Arts Centre in a Dublin theatre festival.

1996: The Lime Bower opens at the Bush Theatre, London

1997: The Weir opens at the Royal Court Theatre, London