Now this is main stage theatre done well. It's a lavish production - a cast of more than 20, half of them children, not to mention an actual baby, a live rabbit, and, particularly plot-relevant, a live goose into the bargain. Written by Jez Butterworth, directed by Sam Mendes, a uniformly strong cast (including Paddy Considine and Justin Edwards, who reminded me of someone and who I've just learned was Ben on The Thick of It), a more or less single but versatile set which at times holds virtually the entirely cast (maybe even the whole cast by the climax) - the Carney family's kitchen and the staircase upstairs.
It's set in 1981, in the heart of the Troubles, and the drama and the weft of it come equally from the political and the familial tensions - tensions which are drawn out and overlaid over the play's three hours, before resolving satisfyingly explosively and quickly at its end. The 'meat' of the play would already have been enough to make it extremely good - Quinn's relationships with his wife Mary and widowed sister-in-law Caitlin, the reverberations when his brother Seamus's body is found in the bog ten years after he disappeared, the multiple layers of the IRA's influence, the subplot and counterpoint of Tom Kettle (his proposal scene was one of the most moving). But it's the mythic resonances, most obviously through the passage from Virgil's Aeneid which gives the play its name, not to mention via the role played by Aunt Maggie Far Away (and especially the monologue when she, oracle-like, tells Aunt Patricia's backstory), which make it really a bit special.
It's set in 1981, in the heart of the Troubles, and the drama and the weft of it come equally from the political and the familial tensions - tensions which are drawn out and overlaid over the play's three hours, before resolving satisfyingly explosively and quickly at its end. The 'meat' of the play would already have been enough to make it extremely good - Quinn's relationships with his wife Mary and widowed sister-in-law Caitlin, the reverberations when his brother Seamus's body is found in the bog ten years after he disappeared, the multiple layers of the IRA's influence, the subplot and counterpoint of Tom Kettle (his proposal scene was one of the most moving). But it's the mythic resonances, most obviously through the passage from Virgil's Aeneid which gives the play its name, not to mention via the role played by Aunt Maggie Far Away (and especially the monologue when she, oracle-like, tells Aunt Patricia's backstory), which make it really a bit special.
