REVIEW: BIRTHRIGHT by TC Murray at Finborough Theatre 5 - 30 September 2023

‘a pressure cooker with the dial turned up high and staying there’ ★★★★★

Two brothers, one inheritance. One of the oldest plots in all literature, and a comparatively old play in TC Murray’s 1910 Birthright given new life at the Finborough. It’s a classic piece solidly constructed, a family drama in a single-set farmhouse in rural County Cork that finds all the fissures and connections the combination of four main characters can present.

Tyrannical father Bat Morrisey (Padraig Lynch) regrets that convention dictates he’s to leave the farm he’s laboured to build to his elder son, Hugh (Thomas Fitzgerald), when his younger, Shane (Peter Broderick) more deserving in Bat’s flinty eye, must leave home and Ireland for a new life in America. Is Hugh such a scoundrel, though, for he’s loved by all except his father, a local hero for his hurling exploits, an educated man, one who likes a drink and a dance? And, perhaps more importantly, is the apple of his mother’s eye (Rosie Armstrong).

Murray’s short, intense family drama, a substantial hit in its day (for a playwright then highly successful if now largely forgotten), is a pressure cooker, and Scott Hurran’s production turns the dial up high and keeps it there until an inevitable, if perhaps too abrupt, final explosion leaves its audience stunned, if not entirely sure that all has been resolved. The final outcome is as shocking as can be and one that seems inevitable only once it’s happened and which will have long-lasting implications for all the leading characters.

Lynch and Armstrong are standouts as two people who perhaps should never have married one another but are irrevocably tied, in a society in which the local priest is the dominant governor, and with the hardships of keeping their farm alive.

As can be the case with plays from the well-made era, the mechanics can show a little, particularly around the convenient exit of character A just before character B enters, and vice versa. But for all its brevity and focus on family love and rivalry, the play touches, too, on a vast range of topics – privilege, inheritance, reward for effort, exile and the stifling nature of conventional thought.

BIRTHRIGHT by TC Murray

Director: Scott Hurran

Finborough    5 September to 30 September 2023

Box Office: https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/birthright/

Cast

ROSIE ARMSTRONG

PETER BRODERICK

THOMAS FITZGERALD

PÁDRAIG LYNCH

AIDAN MCGLEENAN

Reviewer: David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.