Review: THE DRY HOUSE, Marylebone Theatre

A woman lies on a couch. The walls are tinged with damp. The curtains are drawn shut. Empty bottles surround her. She emerges from her slumber covered in sweat, her hands are shaking so much that she can't open the next can of booze.

The Dry House dives headfirst into the murky dramatic depths of alcoholism and addiction and swims around in its nastiness. Claire wants to move her sister Chrissy to a clinic to help her overcome her addiction. But the latter, haunted by a vision of her dead daughter, will do anything not to go, feigning excuses and lies to justify her addiction.

It's unclear if Chrissy's daughter Heather is a ghost or a figment of her narcotic imagination. In any case her otherworldliness is immediately obvious from her first entrance, and her status as a dramatic device is a little too convenient to be believable. Through her we get confessions and revelations making her effectively a theatrical get out of jail free card.

The problem with hitting hard and fast is that writer and director Eugene O'Hare doesn't have anywhere to go after dropping the dramatic payload in the first few minutes. The rest of the play is spent cack-handedly picking up the pieces and trying to move along awkwardly by dropping one too many bombshells to make up for it.

The most questionable plot point comes when the ghost delivers a portentous monologue to the audience where the true circumstances of Heather's death are revealed, a car crash suicide induced by the threat of revenge porn from a toxic boyfriend. The revelation is jarringly tacked on to the point that it feels exploitive, thrown in as a last measure to muster momentum. It is discordant with the rest of the piece, a consequence of misjudged writing in need of edits, and makes little sense theatrically. Until now the production had opted for grubby realism, but this shatters that artifice with a clunky meta U-turn.

Despite this, O'Hare has a curious knack for dialogue. There is a musical allure to the way Claire (Kathy Kiera Clarke) and Chrissy (Mairead McKinley) spat, possibly a literary skill developed from O'Hare's career as an actor. The production is propped up by electric performances; Clarke garners eruditely a sense of the weight of her sisterly duty whilst hiding her own demons. McKinley's performance is equally strong but it's a shame that the writing does not galvanise her performance. There is nowhere else to go when you start at rock bottom.

The Dry House plays at Marylebone Theatre until 6 May

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan