Irish playwright Marina Carr's new play - her first for Druid/the Royal Court - is a blackly hilarious piece that suddenly descends into the horror of the enclosed, incestuous world of a widower and his two daughters. The satiric language has shades of Abbey lyricists like Tom Murphy and Tom McIntyre, and the tense, taut energy of Garry Hynes' production recalls Martin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy.
But Carr's demented rural Ireland - the madhouse of hill-farmer Red Raftery and his misrule of women, the run-down farm with its putrefying animal carcass in every field - is very much her own. Red Raftery periodically wheels in with his melancholic companion, Isaac Dunne, the pair's swaggering shotguns reminiscent of some wasted aristocracy. Meanwhile Ded, Raftery's psychotic son, is a fright, covered in sores and ringworm, only coming in from the cowshed to smoke butts and eat with his hands.
Everyone knocks back whiskey, including Raftery's daughters: Dinah, the long-suffering wife-and-woman of the house, and pampered young Sorrel. Sorrel's suitor is the upright young Dara Mood who loudly speaks his mind. But Mood reckons without Red Raftery's lustful vengeance, and we are forced to witness the horrific blooding of young Sorrel.
It is a shattering lurch that changes the whole tenor of the play. But it also heightens the comic relief which is constantly provided by the daft old bird, Shalome, Red's snobbish mother. In dementia, she is forever fleeing out the door in her nightdress, off to find her own abusive, long-dead "Daddy" back in Kinnegar.
Daughter-incest seems endemic to Carr's landscape. News comes at one stage of a man who has killed himself with weedkiller after his daughter died birthing his child. Meanwhile, in Rafteryland, the women are complicit in each other's ruination. Historically, Raftery's dead wife, rather than submit to sex, sent in her 12-year-old daughter Dinah instead.
Every performance is in-your-face, and there is huge emotional complexity behind Mary Murray's sacrificial Sorrel, Tom Hickey's gigantic Red Raftery and Cara Kelly's hardy Dinah. But the production is young as yet, and has some weathering to do in certain crucial areas, not least the graphic abuse scene. Nonetheless, this piece will kick your head around: part raw, raging satire, showing the whites of its eyes; part knife-twisting acknowledgment of a reality which, as a society, we can't seem to come to terms with. Snapping in and out of modernity, this is yet another reinvention of stage-Ireland: Hynes, Carr and others keep flinging that old chestnut back at us, each time flailing brand new razor blades.
