Raftery’s Hill scales the heights
MICHAEL MOFFATT SHOW OF THE WEEK
On Raftery’s Hill
Abbey Theatre
Marina Carr’s last outing at The Abbey, her adaptation of the Russian tragedy Anna Karenina, was an uncomfortable mix of styles, times, titles and accents that jumped to tragedy by way of soap opera and music hall. She’s much more at home when she’s influenced by the Greek tragedies, as she showed in The Bog of Cats from 1998, and in On Raftery’s Hill, first performed in 2000, that delivers a brutally raw, almost painful experience in this production.
It’s theatrical writing of the first order, delivering the overwhelming emotion of Gothic melodrama, the ugly reality of a doubly incestuous family and a brooding atmosphere that never allows you the luxury of feeling comfortable. The farm of Red Raftery and the surrounding countryside, is a world of obsession, paranoia, loneliness and unspeakable oppression. This is a vision of hell-on-earth, an endless cycle of recurring misery. The atmosphere is set from the very beginning with characters prowling outside in the darkness. And there always seems to be someone lurking around or within the house, on the stairs or behind doors.
Red Raftery’s family is one that would once have seemed unthinkable, but has become painfully familiar. His crumbling farm reeks of the smell of rotting carcasses, symbolic of the moral decay and injury injected into the family by Red’s predatory sexuality towards his two daughters and his treatment of his son Ded, forced to live in the cowshed. It’s never quite clear if Ded (Peter Coonan) is deranged or just demented by the treatment he has had all his life.
By way of relief, Red’s dementia-hit mother (Marie Mullen) regularly appears down the stairs, headed unsuccessfully for her former home 20 miles away, or she sits recalling the joys, real or imagined, of earlier times in India. But it’s a relief that has its own measure of discomfort.
The family, despite the situation, is strung together by a weird kind of dependent bond. The elder sister Dinah, (a beautifully controlled Maeve Fitzpatrick) can comment that even though there are unpleasant things going on in other houses, ‘we’re a respectable family, we love one another’.
She has absorbed her situation from childhood to such an extent that she doesn’t even seem to be speaking ironically.
The younger sister, Sorrel (Zara Devlin) goes from confident young woman capable of making her own choices to acceptance of her lot. Two young women with their lives in suspension.
Lorcan Cranitch’s Red is a disturbing blend of monster and tortured soul, capable of genuine feeling but seemingly unwilling to recognise the horror he’s inflicting and safe in the knowledge that secrets won’t leak out.
‘The family, despite the situation, is strung together by a weird kind of dependent bond’