May 1822, rural Ireland. The defrocked Reverend Berkeley arrives at the crumbling former glory of Mount Prospect House to accompany seventeen-year-old Hannah to England. She is to be married off to a Marquis in order to resolve the debts of her mother's estate. However, compelled by the strange voices that haunt his beautiful young charge and a fascination with the psychic current that pervades the house, Berkeley proposes a seance, the consequences of which are catastrophic.

She says that sometimes, while she plays the piano, she can hear someone... singing. Or crying. I forget which.

Set around a haunted house hemmed in by a restive, starving populace, Conor McPherson's new play weaves Ireland's troubled colonial history into a transfixing story about the search for love, the transcendental and the circularity of time. His last production for the National was the Tony Award-winning The Seafarer.

All of you have a shared capacity to apprehend the beyond. And you perhaps more than any of them have the darkest instinct for second sight.

News: Published on Wednesday 18 July 2011 at 00:00