As everyone prepares for a picnic, a tannoy has been installed to act as a baby monitor in the Judge’s room, and every so often his voice rings out demanding to see someone long-dead, followed by Judith’s as she fusses and comforts him.
The title is an ironic one, although the family don’t particularly see themselves as aristocratic – it’s Tom who suggests the term. In fact their father, despite the fear and respect everyone suggests he’s held in, was actually only a local judge, following a line of much more senior ancestors. And it’s clear that while the O’Donnell name might still mean something locally they don’t actually hold any sway, and they don’t have the finances to keep the old manor house from crumbling. This decay in both the house and their situation is one they’re happiest ignoring for as long as possible – Alice’s husband Eamon (Emmet Kirwan) is one of those most determined to hold onto the illusion, having risen up from a self-described peasant in the neighbouring village, to marry one of the ladies of the big house.
Although playing out in three single-scene acts rather than four, Aristocrats pays overt homage to Chekhov, in a story where a couple of major events spike an otherwise quiet, slow and wordy play that builds up its characters through their self-delusions. It’s not a play that really grabbed me in its own right, but Lyndsey Turner goes for a non-naturalistic production that emphasises the way it lives more in the characters’ dreams and fantasies than in reality. Es Devlin’s set eschews recreating the manor house, instead putting a doll’s house replica of it in the middle of a pale green box, a perfect version that Casimir can point to when regaling Tom with stories of famous figures who may or may not have visited in its heyday. At the back wall, the silent Uncle George* (Ciaran McIntyre) peels the wallpaper off to gradually reveal a mural, a romanticised version of the family in the grounds of their home.
Taken on its own Aristocrats doesn’t stand up as a real classic; the academic who hangs around someone else’s family for no particular reason does feel like an authentically Chekhovian idea, but it’s never not painfully obvious he’s only there as a plot device to get people to tell their stories. And for a play without that much going on, there’s a lot of plot points thrown around without leading anywhere – Eamon turns out to have been engaged to Judith before settling for an abusive marriage to her sister, and when Judith is revealed, very late on, to have left a child at an orphanage seven years earlier, I wasn’t sure how far we were meant to infer a connection between the two things. The evening could be in danger of becoming terminally dull but for me at least Turner’s production saved it from that, by focusing on the family’s otherworldliness and oddness to come up with something gently surreal and wistfully sad.
Aristocrats by Brian Friel is booking until the 22nd of September at the Donmar Warehouse.
Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Johan Persson.
*in probably the evening’s best joke, it’s revealed he’s an alcoholic who went mute when he gave up alcohol, because there’s no point having a voice if he can’t use it to order a drink
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