ARISTOCRATS
National Theatre Lyttleton

ARISTOCRATS was first produced at the Abbey theatre Dublin in 1979. After that it arrived at the Hampstead theatre in 1988 and won the Evening Standard award for best play of the year. Brian Friel once again takes us into his remote and fictitious world of Bally Beg, an isolated township in County Donegal.
This however is not about the peasantry but the decaying Big House where the dying former district judge is sustained by his eldest daughter Judith whose daily grind just about keeps it all together – from making the beds to feeding the chickens to locking the front door.
Her two sisters Alice and Clare with brother Casimir – a failed lawyer – while away the time reminiscing.
Alice is an alcoholic and Clare who is waiting to marry a middle-aged grocer plays Chopin – 16 pieces in all. Another sister has retreated to a convent in Africa. It is summer, and the plot is not two steps away from Chekov’s Three Sisters.
This is an island dominated by the Catholic Church before its economic and social revolution. Bally Beg hall, like Ireland, is crumbling in post-war Europe. And the future has not been defined.
Gina McKee conveys the long-suffering eldest daughter – Daughter if not Mother Ireland.
Whilst Alice, Dervla Kirwan, paces up and down restlessly. Her sexual tension not being eased by her husband Eamon (Peter McDonald).
He is a former village boy who has been intoxicated by the status of the big house. Casimir (Andrew Scott) is eccentric and mischievous. He has convinced a visiting professor that most of the greatest writers have visited the hall over the centuries. He spins out the fantasy which will probably end up as an unpublished thesis in a Mid-West university.
As in the Three Sisters, some of them will depart for the big city – London not Moscow. But one of them says after the father’s funeral “If you leave the locals will plunder the house within hours.” Indeed, history had plundered it all already.
Friel as always paints his characters with assurance and they are easy to watch and there are good jokes. What I wonder would Bally Beg hall be today? The centre of a literary theme park perhaps? Or a refurbished country house for a rich European? Whatever.
The organising of a fading middle-class had been replaced by confident assurance in a secular state.
Ireland clings to its history, tenaciously. Time to let it go.

Until Sept 3
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