No sooner have we recovered from Shelagh Stephenson's Five Kinds of Silence than along comes Marina Carr's not dissimilar study of incestuous abuse. The key difference is that Carr's play is full-bloodedly theatrical, so much so that it risks toppling into Gothic melodrama. It is saved from that by its own self-awareness and by the livid intensity of Garry Hynes's superbly acted production.
Carr's setting is Ireland's rural heartland - Red Raftery's decaying farm filled with the stench of rotting carcasses. The inhabitants have become inured to the smell just as they have to the abnormality of their domestic life. Red's mother is a distrait figure dreaming of her glory days in India. His son, Ded, is a wander-wit. The elder daughter, Dinah, is a drudge who has become, for all practical purposes, her father's wife. Only Sorrel, the youngest, due to marry a local farm-boy, seems to have escaped contamination though the predatory Red puts paid to that.
Occasionally the farm of which I was most reminded was Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort. When Red announces "There was allas skullduggery in the valley" I hear an echo of Aunt Ada Doom crying "There have always been Starkadders at Cold Comfort." What rescues Carr's play from rustic melodrama is her pitying irony and poetic skill. The former is shown by Red's condemnation of low valley morality: the sin under discussion is precisely the paternal incest he himself practises. And when Dinah says: "We're a respectable family, we love one another," you realise she is both wrapped in self-delusion and expressing a literal truth.
Carr doesn't moralise about her characters: she sees them, if anything, as victims of a society in which wives were taught to see sex as a pious duty. And, oppressive as the play is, it is relieved by the writing's poetic grace. A widowed neighbour, who overcomes his loneliness by humanising his cat, talks of "tears rolling off a her whiskers and pounding the pilla". And when Sorrel's fiance describes his own father as a "wan sad picnic in the rain" you get an instant picture of lugubrious dankness.
But it is Hynes's Druid Theatre production and the performances I shall long remember. Tom Hickey shows how Red's sexual voracity stems from desperation - everything about him, from his scuffed shoes to the way he clamps his hand round a whiskey glass, implies a man long past the end of his tether. Valerie Lilley as his mother, Cara Kelly as the submissive Dinah and Mary Murray as the ruined Sorrel all give flawless support. And Tony Walton's kitchen set, with its twisty staircases and walls seemingly made of moss and dung, reminds us this is a play about a decaying rural Ireland - the hidden face, you might say, of the urban Emerald Tiger.
At the Royal Court, London SW1 (020-7565 5000), till July 29.
