As The Dry House begins, a woman is asleep on the sofa in a cluttered living room. Her dressing gown, like the wall behind her, is a pale, defeated pink. This is Chrissy (Mairead McKinley), who started hitting the booze long ago. Rock bottom quickly followed. It was at the funeral of her teenage daughter, Heather (Carla Langley), that she realised she could start drinking properly at last and no one would possibly blame her.
The capacity to arrest our own destruction is central here. “We’re all destroyed the same, so we are,” reflects Chrissy. Claire (Kathy Kiera Clarke) has her own fraught relationship with alcohol, though she is focused mainly on preparing her sister for a spell in a “dry house.” Empties strewn around her like the remnants of a shooting range, Chrissy asks: “Can we talk about it when I get to the end of this can?”
With a name like Eugene O’Hare, the writer and director of The Dry House was perhaps destined to write his own Long Day’s Journey Into Night, even if that play’s shattering bleakness is replaced by a healing, holistic tenor. Those inspirational qualities, which might make The Dry House valuable for people coping with addiction, are what render it a shade less satisfying as drama. This, as well as swipes at social media that feel a bit op-ed in nature, are compensated for by phrasing that is often glorious: Chrissy’s wish to “explode” all over the front of the house, her bones peppering the pebbledash, or her description of herself as having “a fist of tar for a heart”.
As are the performances. McKinley never loses touch with Chrissy’s former vitality, Clarke swaps the ditziness of Aunt Sarah in Derry Girls for a flinty determination and Langley does her valiant best with a distinctly uncertain monologue from beyond the grave. An occasional prioritising of symbolism over common sense is epitomised by the sight of Chrissy triumphantly yanking open the curtains that have been closed for so long, right at the very moment when she is about to leave the house unoccupied for two months.
• At Marylebone theatre, London, until 6 May.
