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.
