The rosary is whipped out within seconds. God-fearing Alannah (Rachael Rooney, her angular movements like a frightened bird) is scrubbing the cooker with a toothbrush when her muddy-booted, foul-mouthed, IRA-recruited little sister Fianna (Meghan Tyler, also the play’s writer; wildness written all over them) bursts in through the window of their childhood home. This fearless revenge play has a taste for chaos, transforming a biting domestic drama into a surreal, gruesome horror.
First performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse in 2019 and set over one stormy night in 1980s south Armagh, this new production is a revelatory character study of these two troubled sisters. Tensions start high and keep climbing. Gun-wielding Brits roam the streets outside, while inside, Alannah tiptoes under the rule of their abusive, now-paralysed father (Stephen Kennedy, with a slippery, sinister entrance, the fear of him built up before he even gets on stage).
After serving time for a crime both women feel guilty over, Fianna’s reappearance sets off a tornado of violence in Alannah’s small and pious life, in which she cleans every speck of dust and slurps alcohol like air. Under Mehmet Ergen’s direction, we recognise both sisters entirely; when Fianna tries to get Alannah to loosen up, the younger sibling is easy and free, the older tight-hipped, ever inward. Through piercing, bitterly comic conversation, they reveal the damage done to them by patriarchal, colonial powers – here, their father and the soldiers (James Pedley-Holden) are rolled into one monstrous enemy – and in the tipsy haze of hatred, agree to put things right.
Tyler’s black comedy is unafraid to take wild, deadly leaps. The sisters drink the house dry, their father’s beastliness is fully realised, and Merve Yörük’s attentive design of a pristine kitchen-living room is quickly covered in a mess far harder to clean up than Fianna’s dirty boot prints. Though some of the carefully won clarity and tension slips as the hallucinatory final scenes flirt with the ridiculous, the merciless guts, macabre humour and justice-driven bloodlust create a vice-like hold on our attention. Gloriously gory, Crocodile Fever offers the dark delight of watching these sisters tear their past limb from limb.
