Theatre: Aristocrats

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

First produced in 1979, Brian Friel’s play Aristocrats centres on an august Catholic family. They come together in their old Donegal manor for a wedding that flags an ominous decline in their status and privilege.

This decline is potentially transformed, however, from a portent of doom to a portent of hope, by the death of the family’s ailing patriarch, Judge O’Donnell (John Kavanagh).

The latter’s superficial Catholic mores and pernicious self-mythologising have severely stunted his children’s growth into adulthood. Only Judith (Cathy Belton) seems to have any real maturity about her, and yet she has sacrificed her own child to satisfy her father’s oppressive values. Like her siblings, she remains under the cosh of her father who, though emaciated from illness, fills the big house with his deranged condemnations, via the brilliant theatrical device of a ‘baby monitor’.

The problem is that the play is teeming with abstractions and sorely lacking in life. The characters smash into themes and symbols like pinballs. Or else they simply spew themes at the audience and engage in preposterous self-psychologising. In the end, whether it’s Patrick Mason’s mannered direction or Friel’s top-heavy text, everything is verbalised where it might, more profitably, have been conveyed through character and action.

Like the torpid O’Donnell family — victims of some mysterious Chekhovian radiation that smokes its way into the set early on — this ornate, yet lifeless, play seemsisolated in its own historical moment and quite, quite adrift.