CARR TAKES US INTO THE DARKNESS
Portia Coughlan Abbey Theatre Until March 16 ★★★★★
Marina Carr has cornered the market in exploring the semi-pagan underbelly of rural Ireland. Her plays teem with belligerent, vengeful, earthy, vulnerable and unforgettable women, exploring the semi-mythical, savage world of Irish legend mixed with Greek drama and a hint of Tennessee Williams’s sensuous American Deep South.
The main character in Portia Coughlan, first produced in 1996, is the Portia of the title, who has all those emotional traits, with the addition of being haunted mentally and almost physically by her dead twin brother, the angelically named Gabriel. He drowned himself, aged 15.
Fifteen years later, on her birthday, Portia continues to feel she failed Gabriel by not joining him in the water. The water in fact is so dominant that it’s almost an extra character in the play. Like so many other legendary and literary twins Portia suffers the pains of her brother and feels he and she are a single entity. People often speculated about the nature of their strange relationship. Portia’s acidtongued grandmother considers the twins weird changelings. And Gabriel didn’t help things by telling Portia he’d come back for her. Not the best situation for a woman with three children she doesn’t care for, a husband she treats with contempt, and a dysfunctional family (with a scandalous piece of undisclosed inbreeding).
Portia, like Shakespeare’s heroine, has three men on a leash, but it’s difficult for men to make headway with a woman whose main aim is to kill herself. Which she eventually does. I’m not giving away a surprise ending there: she drowns herself half-way through the play, and returns in the second half where we get a fuller back-story to the double tragedy.
The play is a disturbing reflection on suicide and the legacy of grief, guilt and anger it can leave behind. Denise Gough is riveting as she tackles Portia’s tenuous hold on life and sanity, apparently doomed by forces beyond her control.
The men in the play don’t get the opportunities for grandstanding that the women enjoy. Businessman husband Raphael, played with understated frustration and controlled anger by Marty Rea, tries unsuccessfully to placate Portia, but the other men are generally fodder for female derision.
Fortunately, the prevailing gloom is lifted by the bawdy contributions of level-headed former prostitute Maggie May (Anna Healy), Portia’s aunt. Some of the best scenes are when she, Portia’s mother (Derbhle Crotty), and Portia’s grandmother (Barbara Brennan) have bouts of verbal fisticuffs.
The staging is simple but a projection on the back wall that fades and resolves into images of water and the drowned Gabriel is a constant reminder of looming death.
■ Gabriel Byrne’s Walking With Ghosts, as presented recently in The Gaiety, goes on demand online from 8pm on Sunday, February 27 to midnight on Friday, March 4. See landmarklive.ticketco.events to book.