(seen at the afternoon performance on 25th October 2023)
Carrie Cracknell’s immaculately staged and directed production is the voice of isolated, frustrated women everywhere, not just Ireland where young mother Portia Coughlan is going out of her mind with boredom and concealing decades of secrets and abuse.
Marina Carr’s play has a structure which surprises – the monkey will say no more as it would be a huge spoiler for those who don’t know. Suffice to say that the first half is effortless to watch and rewards concentration in the second. Every choice made, however unlikely, is for a reason.
Moreover, there is a Shakespearian lyricalness in both writing and delivery augmented with original songs by Maimuna Memon, delivered hauntingly by Archee Aich Wylie.
Alex Eales’s design feels like simultaneously peering into both physical and mental spaces. A home (with a nifty pub transformation) has a wall blown out by a bomb revealing an unforgiving rocky riverbank – the author’s metaphor made real.
This enhances the theme of isolation. It is the kind which comes from both depression and an environment in which trust never existed, gossamer thin love and friendship likely to be shredded in a heartbeat.
Each character twists in their own misery, unable to co-operate emotionally to form a human chain to lift them out of the well.
And yet Cracknell and her troupe form a believable and credible community.
Alison Oliver’s Portia Coughlan is part woman, part shattered child. She knows her perceived worth, wielding her sexuality as a weapon despite knowing it will always explode in her hand. The drama she creates numbs her pain almost as much as alcohol, the shrapnel she generates destroys those around her.
Chief victim is husband Raphael (Chris Walley). Married perhaps because she liked the name, resented for turning her into a mother and wife. Walley has the most sympathetic role, his innate softness a strong counterpoint to all around him, his decency highlighting the confused behaviour of the rest.
As Maggie May Doorley, Kathy Kiera Clarke is handed a gift role as prostitute and sometimes confidant of Portia. Wide-eyed experience, and keeper of more secrets including that of survival in this heady environment.
Other friend Stacia Doyle, victim of an eye gouging, has Sadhbh Malin bouncing between common sense and despair, with a deep streak of loneliness and a love of music.
Local barman Fintan Goolan gives Conor MacNeill a chance at naïve sleaze, uncomprehending in the face of rejection and symptomatic of the issues women in the community face interacting with the men in it.
Grandmother of the clan, Blaize Scully (Sorcha Cusack) is a powerhouse in a wheelchair, knowing how the family reached its position and choosing denial. As an aside, to her credit she kept her composure even through her confusion as a glass she threw emitted a smashing noise before it landed, in an amusing sound cue error.
Notes too for Marianne and Sly Scully (Mairead McKinley and Mark O’Halloran) dealing with the chaos of a daughter’s behaviour.
If possibly the pace of the play slips a little and raises a few more questions than it wishes to answer, that’s in keeping with its wide-ranging exploration of emotional deprivation and selective visibility. Women whose value is recognised only when required to give, and whose calculations of worth and status are distorted from early childhood.
A worthwhile revival, still sadly relevant today, this is a modern classic of Irish writing.
4 stars.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner. Used by kind permission of the Almeida Theatre.