Comparing the late, great Brian Friel (1929- 2015) to Chekhov — a comparison that Friel himself invited — is to both give Friel his due and do him a disservice.
Yet the parallels are too obvious to ignore. You could take the subject and Donegal setting of this 1970s-set minor classic (written in 1979), about the decline of an upper-class family, and view it as a close cousin of Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard. Both dramas, for example, explore the loss of a privileged existence and the estate in which it is lived.
In the case of Aristocrats, in which the whiskey flows as freely as does Russian hooch in Uncle Vanya, it is the Big House that sits above Friel’s fictional village of Ballybeg that is at stake. There are also three sisters here, and an emotionally brittle brother. All are descended from a domineering and dying old judge on whose pension those members of the family who live in the house depend.
All have come together for the wedding of the youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus), a hugely talented pianist whose life as a soloist was aborted by her father because, to him, a peripatetic artist’s life seemed unseemly.
And, as with Chekhov, privilege seems a much less enviable thing at the end of this play than it does at the beginning. The seemingly idyllic version of the family we initially encounter dissolves as it is shown to be as dysfunctional as most other families. It’s like watching the unveiling of a family portrait, and then learning of the flaws, insecurities, virtues and vices that lie behind each confident gaze.
This, actually is the logic that lies behind the motif deployed by director Lyndsey Tuner. The play’s setting is a Georgian house, but Turner sets the action in front of a plain wall whose veneer of paint is slowly unpicked and unpeeled until the family’s rich past is revealed in a glorious oil painting of the family’s ancestors lounging in the grounds.
But Chekhov’s presence does no favours for Friel here. Compared to the Russian master’s ability to reveal a family’s tensions and history through nothing other than the ebb and flow of the most naturalistic conversation, Friel is comparatively clunky.
Everything pivots around Tom (Paul Higgins) a visiting Chicago academic who is researching the historic influence of Catholic aristocratic families, as opposed to their better-documented Protestant counterparts.
The result of this highly visible expositional tool is that you are never unaware of the authorial mechanism by which the fissures in this family are revealed. When no longer narratively needed, Tom abruptly disappears.
As you would expect, the acting is top notch. David Dawson as the flighty fantasist brother Casimir is heartrending in his portrayal of an adult still deeply damaged by the callousness of his father. And Elaine Cassidy and Emmet Kirwan as a childless couple at war with each other are also terrific.
But the rewards here are far fewer than Friel’s Faith Healer, written in the same year and last seen in the West End on this very stage in Turner’s superb production.
That play far more inventively explores the theme of unreliable memory. And, unlike Aristocrats, it is all Friel’s, and Chekhov hardly gets a look in.
