Aristocrats
Donmar Warehouse, London  

IN BRIAN FRIEL'S world of Chopin and hangovers, the once grand O'Donnell family find themselves on the brink of obsolescence in his play Aristocrats. Their bedfast patriarch, once a prominent chief justice in Donegal, barks orders at the family through a baby monitor on the wall, while their beloved Ballybeg Hall succumbs to years of storms and dry rot.

Like many of his contemporaries, Friel wrote almost obsessively about small-town Irish families, usually motherless and living under the thumb of a tyrannical father and their roll call reads like a painstaking excavation of what Friel himself called "familiar melancholy."

But, while Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard and John B Keane made efforts to write the family drama out of the rural Irish kitchen, Friel encases the O'Donnells in the old estate, allowing us to observe with him the inevitable decay of this once-revered institution.