Aristocrats
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Cititour.com Review
Although Brian Friel’s 1979 drama “Aristocrats” has earned some very significant awards over the years, including the Evening Standard for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle for Best Foreign Play, it has never had a Broadway mounting unlike many of the Irish dramatist’s other works.
So curious theatergoers owe a debt of gratitude to the beloved Irish Repertory Theatre and director Charlotte Moore for offering up its second production of the play -- it was previously done in 2009 – as part of the Friel Project. It’s a thoughtful, sometimes moving, and decidedly talky work in the vein of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard,” dealing with class distinctions, a changing country, and a dysfunctional family.
However, awards aside, “Aristocrats” is simply not nearly as well written as that Russian masterwork and demands constant attention and a careful ear to understand all its nuances, especially as Friel drops key details as mere asides that are easy to miss (including the fact that there are two more family members than we first realize.)
The last chapter in Friel’s so-called “Ballybeg trilogy,” the play is set in the mid-1970s as the O’Donnell family reunite at its longtime homestead for the wedding of youngest sister, the shy yet talented pianist Claire (Meg Henessy). We soon learn she is marrying a much older widower with four children, which makes the occasion less than joyous. Why does she not have better prospects? (There’s a brief hint that she suffers from manic depression). In fact, we fully expect the wedding will never happen!
Then again, it’s not a family that has had real luck in that department. The clearly intelligent Alice (Sarah Street) has become a bored alcoholic trapped in London with childhood sweetheart Eamon (Tim Ruddy, in the show’s strongest turn), a hothead who hates his job and both admires and resents the much richer family he married into.
Judith (a sympathetic Danielle Ryan) has remained unwed and is the primary caretaker of the clan’s senile, demanding, and somewhat terrifying father – a former judge -- and his seemingly mute brother (both portrayed by Colin Lane). We realize – sooner or later – that she has at least a romantic attachment to handyman and seemingly good guy Willie (a virile Shane McNaughton), but it’s not until the play’s end that we offhandedly discover why there will never be a true happily-ever-after for the pair.
And then there’s Casimir (a too-quirky Tom Holcomb), a self-described “peculiar” fellow, who seems to be suffering from a combination of arrested development, PTSD and, even possibly, unfulfilled homosexual urges. It’s hard not to disagree with the family members who don’t believe his story of being married to a German woman named Helga no one has met (along with their three sons). And his proclamation that he is “vigorously heterosexual” strikes one as an over-protestation.
Further, at least here, he almost seems interested in Tom (Roger Dominic Casey), a visiting American academic studying the decline of the Catholic aristocratic class. Tom is less a character than a plot device, mostly on hand to point out the inconsistencies in Casimir’s many stories about the family’s storied history.
What all of this adds up to is not quite enough to be completely satisfying. Moreover, the play’s flaws aside, a stronger scenic design than can be accomplished on the Irish Rep’s postage stamp-sized stage – there’s no sense of how faded the family’s mansion has become over the years – would be useful.
More importantly, a more cohesive and dynamic cast than this one (which has so many different accents, not all of them Irish, that it’s dizzying) might also show off the play to stronger advantage. Still, most audiences will leave with some sympathy for their all-too-common plights.
By Brian Scott Lipton
Visit the Site
https://irishrep.org/
Open/Close Dates
Opening 1/11/2024
Closing 3/3/2024
Theatre Info
Irish Repetory Theatre
132 West 22nd St.
New York, NY 10011
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