Remembrance of Things Past or Less than 24 hours away from temperate London & already we are reverting to drunken Paddies....

"Must be the environment, mustn't it?" says Eamon.

The environment is Brian Friel's lovely, sad, memory play, The Aristocrats, currently at the Irish Repertory Theatre till the end of March Madness.

The topic, at least according to the American sociologist visiting the family O'Donnell at their Big House, is "the recurring cultural, political and social modes in the upper strata of Roman Catholic Society in Rural Ireland since the Catholic Emancipation."

Eamon, portrayed by Ciarán O'Reilly pictured above on the left, married into the O'Donnell family and sees the topic through a different lens: "Ballybeg Hall - From Supreme Court to Sausage Factory; four generations of a great Irish Catholic legal dynasty; the gripping saga of a family that lived its life in total isolation in a gaunt Georgian house on top of a hill above the remote Donegal vaillage of Ballybeg; a family without passion, without loyalty, without commitments; administering the law for anyone who happened to be in power; above all wars and famines and civil strife and political upheaval, ignored by its Protestant counterparts, isolated from the mere Irish, existing only in its own concept of itself, brushing against reality occasionally by its cultivation of artists; but tough, resilient, tenacious; and with one enormous talent for - no, a greed for survival - that's the family motto, isn't it? - Semper Permanemus."

But that's an in-law's opinion.

The reality is that the O'Donnell family is more fragile than Eamon realizes and what we, as the audience, see in The Aristocrats, is the last gasp of the dynasty.

This was a great opportunity to see a rarely-produced Friel play, and it had a fine cast in Orlagh Cassidy, above, Rufus Collins, Sean Gormley, Lynn Hawley (left), Geddeth Smith, and Laura Odeh (far left), directed by the ever-fabulous Charlotte Moore.

John Keating, center, was the tragic Casimir, the prince of the O'Donnell family. Named for a Polish prince, Casimir has no kingdom. Mr. Keating plays the role very broadly.  Perhaps too broadly for a character described by Friel as "not a buffoon nor is he 'disturbed.' He is a perfectly normal man with distinctive and perhaps slightly exaggerated mannerisms."

There was nothing slight about Mr. Keating's mannerisms, but all is forgiven for the effectiveness of his comic turn. And I'm curious about the seemingly agelessness of this actor. There might be a Dorian Gray portrait in John Keating's attic.