Alison Oliver gives a performance of transfixing rawness in Marina Carr’s thick slice of black-comic Irish Gothic. When first staged in Dublin in 1996, using the flat accents of County Offally, the story of a woman smashing herself against the strictures of the patriarchy would have been revolutionary. Carrie Cracknell’s revival is pitch perfect, accents and all, and Oliver is supported by a sterling cast. But the play now feels like a relentless riff on James Joyce’s characterisation of Ireland as a sow that eats its young.
We meet Portia on her 30th birthday, which is also the 15th anniversary of her twin Gabriel drowning himself in the Belmont River on their father’s farm. She shambles through life in an angry daze of grief and inebriation, heaping scorn on her rich husband Raphael and the local oafs who desire and molest her, indifferent or just plain hostile to her three sons.
In this she’s almost as radical a figure as Medea. Her communion with Gabriel and the landscape in which he died border on the mystical and the incestuous. But her pain is not unique. Everyone here is suffering from the effects of toxic masculinity (including the men) or the inheritance of bad blood.
The most stable person on stage is Portia’s best friend Stacia (Sadhbh Malin), who’s had an eye gouged out – we know not how or why. The healthiest relationship is between sex worker Maggie May and dull, decent Senchil who looked after her when she’d been beaten and robbed of her money and shoes. The play is often darkly funny but it’s also unremittingly bleak. Hate courses through the generations. A flash-forward before the interval annihilates any hope of a happy ending.
In Alex Eales’s set, the rocky landscape of the Belmont Valley erupts through the back wall of Portia and Raphael’s house. The ghost of Gabriel (Archee Aitch Wylie) haunts the shadowy background, singing Maimuna Memon’s haunting compositions. Cracknell’s production is atmospheric, all half-light, squalor and cigarette-fug. She draws deliciously awful performances from Mark O’Halloran as Portia’s weak, creepy father, Sly, and Sorcha Cusack as his vicious, wheelchair-bound mother Blaize.
But Oliver is the main attraction. Although she broke through on TV in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, on stage she expresses a truthfulness and sense of abandon that outstrips her peers. Here she’s bruised, in cutoff jeans and tracksuit top, flirting with and spurning horrible men, relentlessly nihilistic. You can’t take her eyes off her, and you can’t help but sympathise with and admire Portia Coughlan, even as the play ploughs on to its miserable end.
Almeida Theatre, to November 18; almeida.co.uk
