The Dry (Britbox) is a dramedy about a recovering alcoholic set in Dublin. Therefore it must open with a wake. Shiv Sheridan (Roisin Gallagher) is five months, 17 days, six hours sober and poised at that critical juncture where a weekend with your dysfunctional – and just-about-functionally drunk – family might be exactly the thing to fling you off the wagon. She has just returned home from London for her granny’s wake, which naturally begins with sandwiches and small talk round the open casket (“our side makes fabulous corpses!”) and closes with a wasted rendition of Will Ye Go Lassie Go. You don’t have to have read James Joyce to know all this deep in your bones, but it helps.
Happily, the cliches powering The Dry are of the true kind. So many scenes, particularly in the masterful opener, bristle with beautifully observed moments. Such as when Shiv’s uptight sister Caroline asks her brother Anthony what they need for the wake. “Something that says death, but also hope,” he suggests. “Carr’s water biscuits … brie … booze,” she murmurs, beginning a list. Or when Shiv says she wants to say something at the funeral. “About what?” her mum asks, aghast. “Granny?” “Oh, I don’t think there’ll be any need for that,” her mum concludes. These are throwaway, very real interactions. Funny, yes, but as with most of the jokes in The Dry I rarely cracked a smile. The humour in this tautly written, expletive-laden series is funny like a thwack to the funny bone.
Dramatist Nancy Harris, who won the Rooney prize for Irish literature in 2012, knows exactly how to introduce you to her characters and their troubled histories slowly, naturally and partially, as in real life. This is grownup showing not telling, with echoes of both Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Daisy Haggard’s Back to Life, though The Dry doesn’t always hit the psychological high notes of either.
There’s Caroline, who, if she were any more Claire from Fleabag, would be moving to Finland for the sake of her cold, cold heart. She works in a fracture clinic and thinks anyone gluten free who isn’t a diagnosed coeliac is “just an arsehole”. The children’s parents are the real scene stealers, as is so often the case: Bernie (Pom Boyd) is usually found drinking, unravelling and spying on her neighbour, whom she’s convinced has murdered his wife. And Tom, played by the magnificently sad-faced Ciarán Hinds, is “riding” his acupuncturist and falling apart in his own inscrutable way. Every character, no matter how peripheral, feels fleshed out.
The Dry is also particularly good on class: the posh AA meetings on Dublin’s Southside where the snacks are homemade Rice Krispies cakes, and the more spartan but also more real ones in the inner city, which as Shiv’s future sponsor Karen points out “is for alcoholics. It’s recovery. Not an aerial yoga class.”
Harris also knows the power of inarticulacy, just how much a broken or unfinished sentence can say, particularly in families. “What you put your poor mother through,” hisses Shiv’s poisonous auntie Agatha on the front doorstep when she arrives home. “First, your brother dying, then …” At which point the door opens, and the conversation is closed.
Like Normal People, with which The Dry shares a production company, there’s a great deal of melancholia, emotional integrity, astutely positioned piano music and good-looking folk. The lurches from comedy to tragedy, which can be almost drunken in their extremity, occasionally feel jarring, but mostly they’re vital and authentic. When Shiv walks into the room where her granny’s corpse lies and takes her cold hand, the shock and awe of death is instantly expressed. So too is its absurdity in the following scene, when she fights with her sister over whether to wrestle their granny’s embalmed body into a different blouse. It is ridiculous, awful and so sad. Just like death.
Like all good shows about addiction, The Dry is about so much more than the road to recovery. It’s about alcoholism’s causes and effects; the generational traumas that can never be blacked out; the lifelong impact of the death of a child in the family; and the lies we tell our parents, children, and especially ourselves. At the wake we hear that the children’s beloved granny “never touched a drop in her whole life”. Less than half an hour later, Shiv finds boxes of miniature gin bottles hidden under her bed. All empty. “Granny,” she whispers to herself, “you little fucker”. The Dry has a heart as dark and nourishing as a pint of Guinness. It sobered me right up, and I loved it.
