Euripides never talked about fishnet-covered varicose veins, Guinness-fuelled girls' nights out or the problems with neglected kids watching too many videos, yet there is a distinct stench of Greek tragedy to Marina Carr's portrayal of life in the Irish Midlands.
Last year Carr stunned critics when her grimly comic play about an incestuous patriarch, On Raftery's Hill, played at the Royal Court, and in this drama (produced at the Royal Court in
1996), she also examines how incest exerts its claustrophobic clamp on a small community.
Llinos Daniel gives a magnetic performance as Portia Cough-lan, exuding the devil-may-care desolation of a woman rotting away in her prime. At the play's start, she swills white wine at breakfast on her 30th birthday, but while some might see this as an acceptable alternative to bran flakes, in Carr's hands, it represents the tip of an emotional iceberg whose sinister depths incorporate the death of Portia's twin brother Gabriel, her incestuous relationship with him, and the rumoured incestuous bond between the twins' parents.
Carr's gift is to paint her characters in subtly comic colours, while never betraying the devastation underpinning their lives. Director Jeff Moody has managed to coax intimately enjoyable performances without stumbling into the terrain of comedic caricature, whether it's Maggie Robson, who plays Portia's aunt - all stockings, leather, and dangling fag - Craig Karpel, who appears as the gap-toothed uncle Senchil, or Lyn Fernee, who props Portia up as her one-eyed determined-to-party best friend.
Moody has put up a plasma screen in the centre of a large spider's web, yet the filmed elements often seem flimsy next to this play's potent theatricality. This production can occasionally feel slighty rough around the edges, but it is a powerfully entertaining realisation of Carr' s murky vision.
Portia Coughlan
