Review: PORTIA COUGHLAN, Almeida Theatre

A mother of three who's married to a man she can’t love properly, Portia Coughlan is struggling to keep it together. Imprisoned by the memory of her late twin brother, she wanders the edge of destruction, firing off missiles in self-hatred, ruthlessly demolishing everything and everyone in her trajectory.

Marina Carr’s award-winning play returns to London directed by Carrie Cracknell and starring Conversations with Friends starlet Alison Oliver (who trod the same boards earlier this year in Women, Beware the Devil). A compelling analysis of toxic dysfunction and female pain, Portia Coughlan is a jarring family drama shackled by tragedy. It propels Oliver into theatre stardom. 

She gives an unwaveringly intense, unbreakable performance that’s as complex and particular as it is universal. The actor turns Portia into the product of misogyny and the unwillingness to listen to women’s rage. She imbues her portrayal with the signs of paralysing depression and PTSD, which, given the 90s setting, are unsurprisingly left untreated.

Cracknell has the bleak landscape in Alex Eales’s design swallows Portia. Jagged black rocks loom over the living room, threatening, an endless reminder of Gabriel’s premature demise. It’s an arresting visual. Everyone gravitates around Portia; her grief becomes a magnet for their own and leads Oliver to her mesmerising disintegration. Cracknell punctuates every scene change with haunting songs that verbalise Portia’s solitude and heartbreak written by Maimuna Memon and sung by the ghost of Gabriel (Archee Aitch Wylie).

They're a chilling, pausing addition to an already stirring journey. Oliver is joined by a brilliant company, but this is undoubtedly her show. She is a powerhouse of emotional tragedy surrounded by a bickering Irish family who's crippled by transactional relationships and mental fatigue. Portia’s husband (Chris Walley) is a distant breadwinner whose best isn’t enough to pull his wife out of her head while her relatives wallow in buried resentment and simmering rage.

He tries hard to understand, but he’s ultimately as emotionally ignorant as her parents are. Played by Mairead McKinley and Mark O’Halloran, they’re a criticising, unsupportive force who are constantly reminded of their parental shortcomings by Portia’s face, identical to the son they lost. A feisty grandmother (Sorcha Cusack), an understanding aunt (Kathy Kiera Clarke) and uncle (Fergal McElherron), and Portia's friend Stacia (Sadhbh Malin) complete the clan alongside her suitors (Charlie Kelly and Conor MacNeill).

They build a thoroughly accomplished production. Portia’s overwhelming sense of inadequacy and existential ineptitude is as topical and relatable as it was at the play’s debut - if not even more now. Cracknell infuses new life to a piece that’s almost three decades old, making it feel as fresh as if it was written yesterday and puts a performer who, albeit young, is perfectly capable of delivering the complexities and ramifications of the character’s core trauma.

Much like in real life, Portia's situation doesn’t magically get resolved and the fate of the family is left open-ended by the play's ambiguous second act. It’s an intricate odyssey into the turbulent mind of a raging woman who can’t let go of her past, a remarkable revival that features an immense central performance.

Portia Coughlan runs at the Almeida until 18 November.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

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