Chris O’Dowd is entertainingly roguish as a walking midlife crisis in The Brightening Air

Magic, faith, and family secrets come to light in an old Irish farmhouse

Chris O’Dowd as Dermot in ‘The Brightening Air’ at The Old Vic (Manuel Harlan)

Only the thinnest of lines separates ordinary life and the mystic realm in Conor McPherson’s intriguing new play. His previous show at the Old Vic was the sprawling, Bob Dylan-song-filled Girl From the North Country. Here, he’s pared things back to focus on a family wrestling with life, faith, and fate in a damp old Irish farmhouse.

Rosie Sheehy gives a luminous performance as Billie, the chirping, awkward truth-teller at the centre of this clan. She’s been reading up on Eastern philosophy and reckons that having your body ritually set on fire is the only way to escape life’s eternal loops. Certainly, her existence seems pretty purgatorial, living among the dust and spiders of the ancestral home with her brother Stephen, played with stoic bluntness by Brian Gleeson. Then their uncle, Pierre (Seán McGinley), crashes in: he’s been exiled from the priesthood for his increasingly eccentric views and wants to turn the family place into a spiritual retreat.

Meanwhile, the siblings’ long-suffering sister-in-law Lydia (Hannah Morrish) is pinning her hopes on folk magic, begging Stephen to find the enchanted spring that will bring back her straying husband Dermot (Chris O’Dowd is entertainingly roguish as this walking midlife crisis). No one is convinced by his fling with witchy young Freya (Aisling Kearns): “She’s in her twenties... she’s 20... next year,” he says.

McPherson has chosen a pretty classic, robust dramatic set-up here – a family returning to a house that’s cobwebbed over with uncomfortable memories, thrashing out their differences over tea and whiskey, unearthing old secrets. Still, somehow the plot of The Brightening Air never takes a definitive shape.

A stronger director could have done more to address its often-faltering pace and wayward structure, but here McPherson holds the reins of his own play with a loose hand, working with designer Rae Smith to ornament his strange story with fleeting glimmers of visual enchantment – a vast billowing expanse of silk here, a moment of shadow play there.

The real magic here comes from the beautifully woven speeches McPherson gives his characters as they rebel against tedium, death, and the heavens. For Pierre, God is a “psychopathic bastard” sadistically torturing his deluded worshippers; McGinley makes stellar work of his tirade, timing his revelations with glorious precision.

There are obvious debts to legendary Irish playwright Brian Friel and his deluded religious visionaries, and to Chekhov’s tales of rural dissipation. But McPherson’s play is more jagged, more strange, and more flawed than those greats – a furious middle finger held up against the unforgiving, rainy grey heavens.

At the Old Vic, London until 14 June; oldvictheatre.com