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Aristocrats |
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Rhona Foulis |
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Stepping into the Lyttelton Theatre, the audience is met by a huge screen on stage, picturing an ornate, fairytale woodland. Fairyland is an appropriate image for Brian Friel’s fictional setting, Ballybeg Hall, and the even more fictional lives that its inhabitants claim to lead. The grandeur of the Hall is undermined by its crumbling interior: upon entering this 1970s Irish household, we soon scratch beneath its aristocratic veneer, to learn of shattered hopes and secrets. Four siblings are reunited at
their family home for the wedding of the youngest, Claire. Quirky Casimir has
been living in Germany for eleven years; alcoholic Alice lives in London with
husband Eamon; but Claire and Judith have remained at Ballybeg, nursing their
ailing father and near-mute Uncle George. The audience vantage point is
focused through American academic Tom Hoffnung, researching the
upper-middle-class strata of Catholic Irish families after the Civil Rights
movement, examining their ‘political, economic and cultural influences on the
prevailing and ruled classes’ (so we are told in unwieldy intellectual
jargon). His studies unearth buried truths within a wilting family. Like the scattered thought
processes of Casimir’s tangential speech, home truths are sporadically leaked
to the audience, without a dramatic denouement. Eamon confidentially suggests Casimir’s homosexuality;
Claire confesses her reluctance to wed; in his senility, Father lets slip
that Judith ‘betrayed the family’ by giving birth illegitimately; no one
confronts Alice about her alcoholism or the scar on her cheek; and absent missionary
Anna has been kept ignorant over the degenerate condition of her father.
Social outsider Eamon perceives Ballybeg Hall as ‘a house of reticence, of
things unspoken’, of ‘make-believe’.
The pervading sense is of loss – not just for a collapsing social
class, but for personal ambition and expectation. Casimir creatively dreams
up a life for the Hall, a history of artist visitors and fanciful parties –
not a factual truth, but an imaginative one, with which he comforts his own
failed achievements. Casimir is rumoured to work in a factory; Alice and
Eamon live in a small, damp flat; and Claire seems to lament a broken dream
of being a concert pianist. The old patriarchs (George and Father) no longer
rule; and the younger generation is left listless, ill equipped for life
outside the Hall. Father’s death in Act Three forces the family to carve
up the corpse of their gentrified existence. The death signals a ‘new start’,
but is tempered by melancholy for irrecoverable relationships. Father dies
desperately reaching towards the voice of daughter Anna, recorded on tape, a
sombre reminder of the distance dividing this family and their
socio-political generations. At the play’s end, there is no indication that
the family are any more unified, but perhaps they are a little less lonely:
Uncle George goes to live with Eamon and Alice, and now released of her
maternal duties, Judith may finally recover a life with her orphanage-bound
child. Despite depth and emotional
truthfulness, the play suffers from its tension between the personal and the
political: Aristocrats hovers
between chronicling social history and telling the story of a fragmented
family. Tom Hoffnung feels too much like a narrative device, a construct to
concentrate the play’s political subject matter, rather than a convincing
character in his own right. Similarly, at times, the family utter
unnaturalistic political discourse, the language of rhetoric rather than
dialogue. Overriding this, however, is Friel’s awareness of an alternative,
transcendent voice – that of music. Claire’s piano playing underscores much
of the dialogue and silences on stage, drawing the family together and us
along with it. Nevertheless, because the play captures the family at the
extreme of their decline, the audience does not witness the journey of their
downfall. Of course, this lends Aristocrats
its thoughtful Chekovian melancholy, but the emotional stasis also renders a
strained relationship between audience and character. The Chekov cliché about Friel does resonate, in dramatic structure, theme and tone: Aristocrats is a melancholic meditation on an uncommunicative family at a time of socio-political change. Friel resists adopting a political high ground, but the contemplative tone and measured pace precludes any emotional ‘pull’ towards his impenetrable characters. Tom Cairns’s production skilfully manages their relationships on stage, but Friel forces us to observe rather than sympathise with them. All but one, that is: Andrew Scott delivers a supremely watchable performance as the hyper and eccentric but loveable Casimir. Aristocrats lacks the beauty and poignancy of Dancing at Lughnasa, but retains Friel’s characteristic humour. Cairns highlights all the classic elements of Friel – his delicate marriage of sadness and hope – with some very gracious performances indeed. Till 13 October 2005
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