Irish playwright Brian Friel’s 1979 play Aristocrats was one of his first to adopt a distinctly Chekhovian style — and he goes all in for the approach by depicting a dysfunctional family gathered in a once-lavish Brideshead-style country estate that’s fallen into disrepair on the eve of the death of the patriarch, a former judge occasionally heard in domineering and hallucinatory outbursts over a baby monitor. The family seems to cower at these eruptions, and it’s no wonder that none of them seem up to the task of maintaining the homestead’s opulent past in a mid-’70s present where such luxury feels very much passé. That yearning to maintain appearances, both to themselves and to the outside world, is at the heart of the Irish Repertory Theatre’s thoughtful and spirited new revival.

Judith, played with no-nonsense brusqueness by Danielle Ryan, is the sensible caregiver of the clan, sacrificing her own happiness — including a relationship with a local working-class bloke (Shane McNaughton) — to look after the family’s interests. That includes younger sister Claire (Meg Hennessy), a depressive piano enthusiast whose wedding brings the family together. Boozy sister Alice (Sarah Street), arrives from London with her volatile husband, Eamon (Tim Ruddy), while flighty, talkative brother, Casimir (Tom Holcomb), flies in from Hamburg, leaving behind a supposed wife and children that nobody quite believes actually exist. (There’s a fifth sibling, too, a Catholic nun never seen but briefly heard via a cassette tape message.) Uncle George (Colin Lane), the judge’s brother, also wanders about Charlie Corcoran’s stylized set, a mostly silent and ghostly presence.

Friel takes a very long while to put all the gears of his clockwork plot into place, even tossing in a token outsider — an American academic (Roger Dominic Casey) who’s mysteriously writing about the family and who interviews various family members to provide a pretext for needed exposition. It’s a very long wind-up to a hurried final act in which revelations about each of the family members seem to come so fast and furious they almost seem to unfold like the pre-credits updates in movies about how each of the main players ended up. One wishes that Friel had parsed out some of these details more gradually over the two hour, 15 minute running time, so that they could be better absorbed into the flow of the evening.

Still, there’s a lot to admire in Friel’s old-fashioned world-building — and director Charlotte Moore manages to draw some impressive performances. Holcomb stands out as the self-consciously fey fantasist Casimir, a man whose talky insecurity could tip over into absurdity if played too broadly. But Ryan also shines in the less showy role of Judith, an earthbound woman from whom you feel both the weight of her sense of obligation to both family and tradition. The two represent the fight-or-flight extremes of the Irish experience in the late 20th century, a dichotomy that Friel (and his peers) felt all too well. (No matter how miserable Chekhov’s Russians were, immigration abroad was seldom an option.) Aristocrats is not a great play, but it has elements of greatness — and touches on themes of responsibility that still resonate today.