Portia Coughlan, Almeida review ★★★★★

Portia Coughlan is a problematic character. Deeply depressed, hooked on alcohol and cigarettes, aggressive, self-pitying, she is haunted by the death, 15 years earlier, of her twin Gabriel, a catastrophic event that has entirely derailed her life.

She is marking her 30th birthday much as she has lived the previous 15 years: starting the day with copious amounts of brandy, staggering aimlessly around her living room, inexorably drawn to the river where her twin drowned.

In the Almeida revival of Maxine Carr’s eponymous Irish classic, Alex Eales’s set is a fairly nondescript dark living room, the back wall of which has been ripped open to reveal a rough, craggy, malevolent river bank – the scene of Gabriel’s death.

Alison Oliver and Charlie Kelly in Portia Coughlan, Almeida. Photo: Marc Brenner
Portia Coughlan is difficult to like, and Alison Oliver (Women, Beware the Devil, Dancing at Lughnasa) gives a haunting portrayal of the character: whether reminiscing about her brother, insulting her long-suffering wealthy husband (Chris Walley), having accusatory screaming matches with her parents, or engaging in listless riverside trysts with her lover (Charlie Kelly). In an excellent central performance, Oliver makes her simultaneously vulnerable and beyond reach.

Although named after its protagonist, Maxine Carr’s 1996 play widens its focus from the individual to the wider family in the rural setting of the Irish Midlands. Portia Coughlan is about hatred and damage passed down through generations, about jealously kept secrets, in-breeding and incest.

Portia’s present may have been determined by the loss of her twin, but the poison, the play seems to say, was already there, flowing in the ancestral blood.

Structurally, Portia Coughlan plays with chronology in a slightly disconcerting manner: Portia dies by drowning towards the end of Act I, but returns in Act II, which may be meant as a more subtle alternative to the original denouement, or something else entirely. In its invocation of nature and the overpowering connection between the twins it has hints of other-worldly mysticism.

Strongly directed by Carrie Cracknell (Oil, The Deep Blue Sea), this Almeida production is punctuated by soulful songs especially composed by Maimuna Memon, and boasts a uniformly efficient cast, though special mention must be made of Sorcha Cusack’s vile grandmother, spitting venom at all and sundry from her wheelchair.

There are a few light moments and some lighter characters, particularly Portia’s friend Stacia (Sadhbh Malin), who’s lost an eye and sports an eye-patch, the former sex worker Maggie Mae (Kathy Kiera Clarke) and her dull and kind partner Senchil (Fergal McElherron); but on the whole there is little light relief in this unremittingly gloomy work, its poetic use of language notwithstanding.