The preoccupation with death is there from the start. A heaviness hangs over Alex Eales’s neat domestic set, a ragged crater blown out of the back wall. Behind is revealed the rocky bank of the Belmont river, where half of Portia Coughlan’s mind and soul lie at all times, her body aching since the death of her twin brother 15 years before.
Carrie Cracknell’s production of Marina Carr’s 1996 Irish drama is beautifully bleak, rich with secrets and mourning. Alison Oliver as Portia, the show’s centrifugal force, is frantic and numb, her ghosts seeming to scratch at her throat, desperate to get out or bring her down with them. As the world turns around Portia on her 30th birthday, she is stuck in thoughts of her lost twin and the memory of his voice. Archee Aitch Wylie emerges in the gloom to sing to her, the water-soaked ghost of the child. Wylie’s lapping voice is exquisite, with Maimuna Memon’s songs digging into Portia’s reality and loosening her grip on the world.
Carr’s language is lyrical too, violence and loss seeping into every interaction. Cracknell’s assured production rests on the twisted idea that the closer you are to someone, the deeper your love and hatred for them are intertwined; Portia grasps at her mother, her father, her husband, needing them close even as she spits that she despises them.
This is a tragedy wrought from bitterness that has been tramped down and left to fester. It is at once deeply grounded in grim reality and caught on something ever-strange, with the play always returning to the uncanny, ethereal bond between the twins. As dark, hidden truths are piled up, the stage seems to heave with what everyone but Portia wishes they could forget.
Here is a mighty cast of bruised family and friends: Mairead McKinley as Portia’s mum, stern and cracked by the life she’s been handed, Chris Walley as the worn-out husband without a clue how to care for his wife. Sorcha Cusack brings dark hilarity as the unstoppably foul-mouthed misanthrope. It is a glorious, melancholy ensemble, driven by the weight of all they have lost and all they have had to bear.
At the Almeida theatre, London, until 18 November
