Portia Coughlan at the Almeida – Reviews

"Drama rich with secrets and mourning"

"Marina Carr’s play is beautifully bleak and Alison Oliver’s central performance as a woman lost in grief is matched by a mighty cast"

"Carrie Cracknell’s production of Marina Carr’s 1996 Irish drama is beautifully bleak, rich with secrets and mourning. Alison Oliver as Portia, the show’s centrifugal force, is frantic and numb, her ghosts seeming to scratch at her throat, desperate to get out or bring her down with them."

"Cracknell’s assured production rests on the twisted idea that the closer you are to someone, the deeper your love and hatred for them are intertwined"

"Sorcha Cusack brings dark hilarity as the unstoppably foul-mouthed misanthrope. It is a glorious, melancholy ensemble, driven by the weight of all they have lost and all they have had to bear."

"Superb, dreamlike revival of Marina Carr’s harrowing classic about a woman haunted by the death of her twin"

"Who better to bring the play back to the stage than director Carrie Cracknell, whose previous Almeida outing, ‘Oil’, was a masterclass in mingling epic and intimate. Cracknell makes us see the world through the deadened eyes of Portia."

"It’s all so richly layered, not least the performances Cracknell brings out of a crack cast led by Alison Oliver, sullen and slumping, permanently drunk, but never comically so."

"Sorcha Cusack’s foul-mouthed, self-righteous grandmother is a highlight, as is Mairead McKinley as Portia’s stoical mother Marianne."

"Striking delicacy"

"Wrenching, atmospheric revival of Marina Carr’s still-shocking story of generational trauma in rural Ireland"

"Director Carrie Cracknell carefully crafts an atmosphere of deep, inescapable melancholy."

"Alison Oliver gives a committed, ferocious central performance as Portia, tears streaking her cheeks as she snaps from fury to manic exuberance to maudlin, sloppy drunkenness."

"Composer Maimuna Memon provides a gorgeous, haunting score built on mellifluous guitars, ambient drones, and raw, yearning vocals sung live with extraordinary power by Archee Aitch Wylie"

"Slice of Irish Gothic is darkly funny but unremittingly bleak"

"Alison Oliver is absolutely transfixing in this dark Irish Gothic tale"

"Alison Oliver gives a performance of transfixing rawness in Marina Carr’s thick slice of black-comic Irish Gothic."

"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."

"Cracknell’s production is atmospheric, all half-light, squalor and cigarette-fug. She draws deliciously awful performances from Mark O’Halloran as Portia’s weak, creepy father, Sly, and Sorcha Cusack as his vicious, wheelchair-bound mother Blaize. But Oliver is the main attraction."

"A portentous but unsatisfying tale of a woman hellbent on self-destruction"

"‘Conversations With Friends’ star Alison Oliver is moodily compelling as a dissatisfied mother haunted by her dead twin, but Marina Carr’s play is anti-climactic"

"Carrie Cracknell’s revival at the Almeida Theatre laboriously shades in the mythic Irish world she lives in, a lyrical background to its once-controversial themes."

"There’s mythical force in spades here: Portia talks of a wolf’s tooth, lodged in her heart, which condemns her to an early grave. Accordingly, Cracknell’s production stirs up a maelstrom of Irish gothic atmosphere to heighten the mood."

"There’s also something unsatisfying about the structure of Carr’s play... this structure feels at odds with the massive, heightened, near-hackneyed themes here: Portia’s darkly incestuous relationship with her lost twin, the river that calls her to an early grave. The promised tragic resolution is denied."

"Marina Carr’s intense Irish play finds its ideal director"

"Make a list of the main elements in Portia Coughlan and you come up with an Irish drama by numbers: a haunting, a tragedy in a stony landscape, bubbling talk, a cursing crone, shades of Greek myth with incest and anger. Marina Carr’s play is richer than this, less because of the emphatic Merchant of Venice references (the heroine’s fatal river is called Belmont) than because of some line-by-line dazzle – who will forget the man who was “not so much born as knitted”, and the sheer ferocity of Portia herself."

"It is, though, the intensity of Carrie Cracknell’s production that makes the evening feel rapt. Alison Oliver – of Conversations With Friends – moves through the action like a knife, all blade, all unprotected. Who wouldn’t want to see a Cusack – Sorcha, in this case – spitting swearwords from her wheelchair? Sound and visual design combine to supply a direct line to the heroine’s emotions."

"Carr’s play has taken on contemporary classic status. A no-holds-barred depiction of despair and a brutal takedown of small-town Ireland, it’s a Greek tragedy wrapped up in brooding Irish gothic and peppered with pitch-black comedy."

"Slinking through the middle of it all is Alison Oliver’s Portia, a woman so drenched with self-loathing, she’s barely there. Oliver’s performance, sullen, snarling and raw as bleeding steak, admirably rejects pity."

"It’s a grim, unyielding watch: savagely funny in places; brutally bleak overall."

"A hypnotic Alison Oliver can’t save this absurd Irish melodrama"

"The Conversations with Friends actress is a revelation – but the Almeida's staging doesn't make the case for reviving this now-clichéd play"

"... Carrie Cracknell’s production has an impressively queasy watchability. Alison Oliver, best known for her cool, compressed central performance in the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, radiates a mesmeric, ugly animal energy as Portia"

"Carr’s portrait of a woman stubbornly resisting the straightjacket roles of mother and wife in conservative rural Ireland no longer has the subversive electricity it would have done 30 years ago"

"Its good to see Cracknell back directing on stage – she is particularly attuned to stories of isolated women and her beautifully detailed production, with its dancing lantern glow, is both alive to the play’s numinous rugged poetry and its blackly funny naturalism."

"I’m not sure her production ultimately makes the case for the play’s revival. Oliver, though, restless, visceral, hypnotic, is a revelation."

"Alex Eales’s set anticipates a wrecking ball: a chintzy, if neglected, domestic interior gives way to exposed brickwork and beyond it a boulder-strewn riverbank."

"Its director, Carrie Cracknell, has blistering form in depicting women in psychological turmoil... But this disappoints. Carr’s play feels an implausibly gothic, overblown piece of Oirish archetyping and meandering mythic mishmash."

"The fault lies in the play, not the performances of a game 11-strong Irish cast including Sorcha Cusack as the battleaxe wheelchair-using grandmother Blaize and the Derry Girls actress Kathy Kiera Clarke as the former prostitute Maggie May"

"A relentlessly grim night"

"By the end of this unrelentingly grim evening you’re left with one question: why did anyone think Marina Carr’s overheated pastoral tragedy, first seen at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1996, deserved to be revived?... Otherwise, Carrie Cracknell’s brooding production is an utter waste of a fine supporting cast."

"Oliver’s performance is locked into the same bleary-eyed mode throughout. Is there anything to be salvaged amid the exhausting bouts of exposition? Maimuna Memon’s songs — sung by the ghost of Gabriel (Archee Aitch Wylie) — are atmospheric, even if they are overused."