This compassionate and delightful romantic comedy from the Pulitzer Prize, Tony and Oscar-winning author of Doubt will win many hearts. The great appeal in John Patrick Shanley’s play lies in one woman’s fight to overcome spectres of isolation and barrenness by staring down what stands in her path, and in its final message of tender reconciliation.

Set in rural Ireland, Outside Mullingar is, at heart, an essay on the redeeming qualities of love and forgiveness, and within it echoes of Catholic tradition and Celtic mysticism and romanticism. At the start, as a mist disperses out across the audience, we hear church organ music morph into a gentle Irish reel before we become intimate onlookers into the Reilly’s modest farmhouse kitchen, where personal politics can no longer be kept in check.

Now on the threshold of middle age, Anthony Reilly and Rosemary Muldoon have up till now both been marooned by birth into caring for the small farms that their ageing and dying parents have clung to with a kind of nationalistic fervour. The land is currency here. They stand at a crossroads. In order to wrest control of their own destinies one of them will have to fight for both their rights to a happiness so far denied to them. Threatening to wield a final act of influence on the future of his land, old Tony Reilly plans to disinherit his only son, a man with an already diminished sense of worth, and who is oblivious to the longing of his neighbour Rosemary who has been secretly pining for him as the years have passed away. Between the two families’ farms lies a thin strip of land that contains secrets that hold the keys to two hearts.

Director Sam Yates has been blessed with a wonderful cast in Owen McDonnell as the brooding and self-effacing Anthony Reilly, James Hayes as his legacy-fixated father Tony, Deirdre O’Kane as the fiery and frustrated Rosemary Muldoon and Carol Macready as her God-fearing and recently bereaved mother, Aoife. Throughout they deliver scattergun exchanges with one another – one-liner broadsides across table and turf, lyrically revealing raw truths about emotional need and survival.

Hayes’s curmudgeonly portrayal of the fading father figure nicely sets up the wall that Rosemary Muldoon must beat her head against. His battle to ensure the farm be left to a Reilly ‘worth the name’ presents her with a challenge that cannot be overlooked. O’Kane is more than equal to the task of firing Rosemary’s resolve. McDonnell credibly presents the eccentric loner that is Anthony Reilly, managing to take his head-down shyness when confronted by Rosemary’s very direct inquisition of his reticence towards her to a passionate snapping point.

Shanley, a native New Yorker, visited his Irish family farm for the first time in his forties. It would be another 20 years before he would finally find his voice in that setting. “I love the theatre, I love the physical space of a theatre. With movies you need $20million, and if you can’t get it, you can’t make the movie. With a play I can do it in my living room.” Richard Kent’s well detailed set at the Ustinov offers just that intimacy.     ★★★★★ Simon Bishop   21/04/15

Photo: Simon Annand