Conor McPherson’s latest is a curious piece: a penny dreadful with the sort of highbrow ambitions that ought to set you back a shilling. The Veil is a ghost story shot through with philosophical and political metaphors, but, since these are vague and tangled, glanced rather than gored, the play never really reveals its purposes.
Even so, if one can forgive it’s exposition and speechifying, there’s plenty to hold the attention and McPherson’s tale is full of gothic delights.
A decaying country estate in 1822, debt-ridden and turbulent after Ireland’s economic woes, is home to three generations of Lambroke women. The youngest, Hannah, is due to marry a wealthy Englishman, the dowry from which would resolve the family’s financial slide.
However, Hannah is troubled by voices and visions of her father, whose suicide she was first to discover, and makes easy prey for the visiting Reverend Berkeley, recently defrocked, and his laudanum-fuelled companion Charles Audelle, romantic philosophers with leanings towards mysticism.
McPherson’s primary subject is, I think, rationality, as applied to both the world and society. He presents a world of blind acceptance opening its eyes for the first time, but simultaneously warns against slavish submission to reason alone. We must at least entertain the possibility that there might be more things in heaven and earth &c.
McPherson’s characters take personal experience as proof, seeking explanatory causes outside themselves. Each gets carried away with their own recounting, swelling their language and raising their voices as they veer towards trance. Contrastingly, Lady Lambroke (a schoolmarmish Fenella Woolgar) reasons away her own apparently spiritual experiences as dreams caused by a full stomach. She may seem the one to side with, but McPherson suggests that the truth is not so neat as all that.
The same goes for the play’s social side, as a simmering revolution proves itself worthy but unwise and impractical. Estate manager Mr Fingal, unpaid for 13 months and working for love not money, finally challenges the old order only to fizzle back into servitude.
But McPherson obscures the piece by attempting too much. The philosophical particulars under interrogation are too dense to take on in one sitting and the play creaks under the weight of literary allusions. While the faltering estate, complete with its unrequited manager, clearly echoes Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, there are further nods to Ibsen’s Ghosts in the collapse of a local property and J.B. Priestley’s fascination with time’s fluidity. Arguably, there are also subtler chimes with Twelfth Night, Berkeley and Audelle cast as Belch and Aguecheek, and The Tempest.
Tonally too, it seems uncertain, occasionally swerving into pastiche when its melodramatic tendencies – a necessity for gothic chillers – are indulged. Mostly, however, McPherson’s own direction demonstrates real nuance in pace and rhythm, sometimes heightening tension, sometimes puncturing it. These are brilliantly choppy waters and Rae Smith’s design, gorgeously mildewed and crumbling, smartly keeps you on edge with periphery shadows. A moonlit pot plant and a flickering candle, so far stage right they’re actually in the wings, repeatedly catch your eye to harvest goosebumps aplenty.
McPherson’s willingness to let your eyes roam the stage also allows the ensemble acting to blossom and the reactions are as fascinating as the raconteurs.
Jim Norton’s Berkeley, “the soul of joviality,” is a delicious pomp, squeezing his words out as one does tunes from a bagpipe, and Adrian Schiller finds in Audelle a complex bohemianism, effete and ineffectual, that’s both ludicrous and poignant. Together, they seem like unlicensed and immoral ethnologists, abusing their subjects for personal gain. Emily Taaffe, all Brontesque beauty, delicately pure but haunting, smartly dissolves Hannah’s initial self-confidence towards brittleness and, even if it’s observation tips the scales towards humour, Peter McDonald does sloshed with real panache as Mr Fingal.
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