Finborough Theatre
London
September, 2023

A courageous and provocative piece, playwright T. C. Murray wrote Birthright in 1910 for the Irish repertory company, Abbey Theatre Dublin. Causing a storm, this was Murray’s debut and it hit the zeitgeist garnering ructions and acclaim across the Irish isles and beyond to the West End and Broadway. The Finborough Theatre proves its much celebrated status with another compelling contribution to fringe theatre.

This new staging, the first in over 90 years in Britain, sees Director Scott Hurran bringing this intense domestic drama to its fullest expression. Set in Cork, we witness a family in crisis at the most intense and acrimonious point in its history. The scenes roll together smoothly with the passions burgeoning to a thundering conclusion. The set, costumes and overall atmospherics create a highly evocative and immersive experience. The lighting starts off bright then gets darker as the family descends into the abyss. The increasing use of candlelight as the play elapses, makes the characters seem like ghosts with their transparencies emerging from the ensuing dramatic exposition.

Patriarch, Bat Morrissey (Pádraig Lynch) commands the stage, infusing the play with ribald energy and undergirding the pathos with his slow-boiling rage. It’s one of the most intimidating and statured performances I’ve seen in recent times and to be so close in that intimate space was breathtaking. The only downside, his tremendous vocal power is unbalanced with the rest of the cast and mismatched to the smaller space – a sense of proportion vocally would make his performance more accessible. Maura Morrisey (Rosie Armstrong), impressively stoic in her role as the long-suffering house wife, is the doting mother of the ill-favoured older son, Hugh Morrissey (Thomas Fitzgerald). The favoured son, Shane Morrissey (Peter Broderick), seeks to provide a balance to his father’s wrath through filial connection yet finds it must ultimately give way to his sense of duty. All actors found their place in the interconnection and with superb Irish accents and deep commitment to the work, this group are weaving a rich tapestry for audiences to enjoy.

I was thoroughly overwhelmed by the play which felt like a time capsule artistically – dropping us to a moment when theatre was done differently. I noticed I was looking for more of a psycho-therapeutic exploration of the characters’ inner worlds, although I recognise that to be a style only established in the second half of the 20th Century when theatre became more mimetic and non-diagetic. With this type of theatre, we have to do the work to hear and delve and render the world of the play given the psychological “nudity” we’re so used to in contemporary theatre is not the modus operandi here.

Much would have been understood by early 20th Century audiences about the cultural contexts of the story but fast-forward over one hundred years and I, a child of the 90s, am used to having more laid out for me in the writing. Nonetheless, it’s a noble cause to revitalise a piece of theatrical history and be sophisticated enough to execute the archaeology of the artform to the extent that a modern audience can find new meaning. The ensemble and production team have achieved this with aplomb and should be commended for this audacious and intelligent rendering. It was an explosive, transportative, fly on the wall snapshot of rural life in early 1900s Ireland. I felt the cold, the adversity and the corresponding warmth of the familial hearth, over-heating as fate scored the family with its inescapable summing.

Stuart Bruce

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