A tender portrait of care, exhaustion and love filled with dark humour Rating
Excellent
Selected from over 1700 entries, Eoin McAndrew’s Little Brother won the Verity Bargate Award, including a full run at Soho Theatre. Brigid (Catherine Rees) gets a phone call from her little brother, Niall (Cormac McAlinden) in the middle of the night. Niall, unable or unwilling, to tell her that he needs her help, just exasperates her. They agree to meet for a chat the next weekend, but then Niall sets his hand on fire.
In the hospital, Brigid is met with a wall of advice on how she can help her brother, and how she must fireproof her home to keep him safe; the absurdity of asking if she has a gas or an electric oven nicely gets across the utter bewilderment Brigid feels about the entire situation. Director Emma Jordan manages the tone beautifully: every moment of horror or frustration is balanced by a flash of humour, keeping the play’s emotional weight bearable.
Navigating the care system becomes a challenge, despite Niall’s urgent need for assistance, he goes onto a waiting list, and it’ll be months and months before a therapist is available. Private care takes another chunk out of Brigid, bleeding her finances and highlighting the inequity at the heart of the system. It’s a soft-spoken indictment of the state of the NHS and social care, and the lack of available support.
McAndrew cleverly brings together his themes of mental health and the relationship between brother and sister, and brings a lot of humour. Their relationship holds the emotional core, and really captures the difficult and sometimes contradictory love between siblings and how that can fray when one has to become a carer for the other. Both Rees and McAlinden really bring this across, as even in the moments of anger and frustration, the bond between them remains. Rees shows us the exasperation and the feeling that Brigid doesn’t know how to deal with this, and when her love occasionally threatens to suffocate, it’s all coming from a good place. McAlinden treads a fine line really well, aware of Niall’s need for help, but also becoming more aware of what this need is taking from Brigid and the toll on her life. Both actors really step up to the strong script. McAndrew’s script is brave too, he doesn’t shy away from his themes – self harm is front and centre, but it isn’t sensationalised or mocked, instead it’s treated with honesty and compassion. It feels heavy, we feel the weight of Niall’s troubles and Brigid’s care, without losing sight of the humanity beneath.
Little Brother feels real. I’ve been close to a very similar situation where a sudden family crisis derails everything, work, social life, and relationships, and urgent care was needed for an extended period. McAndrew nails that exhausting vigilance: the fear of the phone ringing and the dread when it does, along with the endless cycle of trying to hold everything – including yourself – together as the system grinds slowly along mercilessly unhelpful. Humour is what keeps you going. Having spent almost a year making near-daily hospital visits, I recognise that empathy totally. Ask me about that time now, and what I remember isn’t the exhaustion and the fear, but the moments of laughter, the dark jokes, the ways found to navigate through the system and the gentle bickering that somehow kept everything manageable. McAndrew understands that instinctively; the humour does not deny or diminish the pain, but instead is the thread that holds people together when everything else is unravelling.
Little Brother is a tender portrait of care, exhaustion and love, filled with dark humour – grounded in a horrible reality that most will be lucky not to have to ever face.
Written by Eoin McAndrew
Directed by Emma Jordan
Little Brother plays at Soho Theatre until Saturday 22 November.
