The complicated relationship between the Irish and alcohol has been given countless takes over the years.
So what new angle could this dramedy from the producers of Normal People possibly take? With its incredibly raw, frustrating and honest depiction of a woman fighting tooth and nail to remain on the wagon within an irreparably dysfunctional family dynamic, I found my answer.
The Dry begins at a wake. The Sheridans’ maternal grandmother has passed and Shiv (Roisin Gallagher) is returning to Dublin from London to pay her respects. Since no one appears to have remembered to pick her up from the airport, Shiv just about makes it to the wake in time – though not before a small confrontation with a local who appears to be on his second pint of Guinness by half past nine in the morning. “Are you ok?” Shiv asks, making a dangerously London-ified intrusion – to which the stranger responds, “Are you one of those f****n’ religious nuts?”
This sets the tone for Shiv’s continued attempts to stay sober during her extended stay in Dublin. Already considered the black sheep of the family due to her problems with alcohol, Shiv can neither please her family when drinking, nor when sober. A woman of extremes, she sticks out like a sore thumb between the cool as a cucumber baby of the family, Ant (Adam J. Richardson), and her uptight younger sister, Caroline (Siobhán Cullen).
Shiv is full of good intentions upon her return and is ready to prove that she has changed, but her family aren’t having any of it. Her Dad, Tom (Ciarán Hinds), is quietly supportive, though fails to speak up when it matters. Mum, Bernie (Pom Boyd), refuses to believe that Shiv is a different person, and her frustration with what she feels is her daughter’s imposed recovery builds to a boiling point.
Just as all the big Irish authors throughout history touched on alcohol addiction – Joyce did so in Dubliners, and Beckett was an alcoholic who treated the vice as a source of creativity – so too did they write of the need to escape Ireland to make a change. But Shiv’s recovery has the opposite effect, forcing uncomfortable truths to rise to the surface. Armed with her toolkit of London-derived “psychobabble” (as Bernie puts it), we watch as Shiv navigates and exposes the rifts within her family with self-destructive honesty.
My partner turned to me at the beginning of episode six, when Shiv can’t find her underwear, and declared with utter exasperation, “everyone in this show is a bad person.” I understood his frustration – it’s part of the point. But it speaks to the wonderfully complicated, powerful performances of everyone involved in The Dry.
Richardson’s Ant is wonderfully raw, while Cullen’s embodiment of Caroline oscillates perfectly between stiffness and vulnerability. Hinds’ portrayal of the still grief-stricken Tom, numb following the unexpected loss of his eldest child, is one of the more subtly emotional performances, and his scenes with Richardson in particular are truly powerful. A confrontation in the street between father and son over Ant’s feelings that he was never loved to the same degree as his late brother, Carl, is perhaps one of the show’s best scenes.
On the other hand, Gallagher’s Shiv is a wonderful hurricane of idiocy, destruction and self-advocacy – while her sponsor, Karen (Janet Moran), has some brilliant one-liners.
But it’s Bernie who proves the most searing voice. At one point she exasperatedly asks her daughter, “Are you sure this is the best place to get sober?” And yet Dublin acts as a crucible for the Sheridans – burning hot and explosive in order to reveal a purer, healing truth.
