The set reveals a house sliced apart so we see the cast moving through its rooms. One bedroom remains dark, empty, tomblike. When a guest is sent to sleep there she runs out because she feels its “bad energy”.
We learn that it belonged to the only man in this family with six women. He died under such a cloud that his grave has been graffitied and his wife, Mary (Bríd Brennan), has served a prison sentence for defending whatever he did.
A Clean Break co-production under the direction of Róisín McBrinn, the drama begins with a welcome home, as in the case of Favour, staged at the Bush theatre, which McBrinn co-directed. But Mary returns from prison unrepentant, bearing a grudge against her daughter Julie (Andrea Lowe) for not backing her in court, and raging at her stepdaughter Briana (Alison Fitzjohn) for testifying against her.
A significant portion of Deborah Bruce’s drama plays out as comedy, combined with domestic gothic. Things go bump in the night and Kat Heath’s set morphs from kitchen-sink realism to levels of spookiness akin to 2:22: A Ghost Story. Paule Constable’s lighting is firmly in horror movie mode: when the washing machine becomes illuminated and sinister beams shine through the front door we almost expect an extra-terrestrial encounter.
Julie is a recovering alcoholic who bears the bruises of domestic violence but acts clownish; her younger sister Bernie (Liz White) is the thinly drawn “responsible” one; Mary’s friend and fellow ex-prisoner Leigh (Posy Sterling) is amusing but rather randomly thrown into the mix. Meanwhile, Briana was once Tina, but has renamed herself as a way of recovering from abuse. She speaks in overblown language of self-help, repeating mantras and talking about creative visualisation.
The tone flips quite late and very suddenly when the true horror of this story is revealed. It hinges on a confrontation that exposes heinous male violence against women and child sexual abuse. In the figure of Mary, there are echoes of Heidi Schreck’s grandmother, Betty, in What the Constitution Means to Me. We see, in her fierce denials of culpability, how coercive control demands complicity.
There are some clumsy switches between humour and melodrama in the script while the comedy itself is hammy. But beneath its apparent simplicity runs a complex dynamic between family members and cyclically repeated abuse or trauma that feels as genuine as it is tragic. By the end, the characters are no longer comical and stereotypical but flesh and blood women, doing all they can to survive.
At the Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, London, until 10 June
