What are the chances? Two plays haunted by dead boy twins opening on consecutive nights. First Portia Coughlan, the Irish playwright Marina Carr’s 1996 domestic portrait of a ruinously unhappy young wife and mother in the rural Irish midlands. Alex Eales’s set anticipates a wrecking ball: a chintzy, if neglected, domestic interior gives way to exposed brickwork and beyond it a boulder-strewn riverbank.
The play opens with the listless Portia (Alison Oliver) knocking back brandy. Her hangdog husband, Raphael (Chris Walley), returning from work, feebly objects that it is barely 10am and there are dirty dishes. But it is Portia’s 30th birthday. Although he gives her a diamond bracelet “worth five thousand”, she remains impassive.
It is also the 15th anniversary of the drowning of Portia’s twin brother, Gabriel. He haunts Portia (his ghostly pull on her is represented by the ethereal countertenor singing of Archee Aitch Wylie). Portia, meanwhile, haunts his place of death, meeting lovers she disdains for unsatisfactory liaisons by the river.
Its director, Carrie Cracknell, has blistering form in depicting women in psychological turmoil. Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea and Hattie Morahan in A Doll’s House were two of the past decade’s most luminous productions. But this disappoints. Carr’s play feels an implausibly gothic, overblown piece of Oirish archetyping and meandering mythic mishmash.
The fault lies in the play, not the performances of a game 11-strong Irish cast including Sorcha Cusack as the battleaxe wheelchair-using grandmother Blaize and the Derry Girls actress Kathy Kiera Clarke as the former prostitute Maggie May, fondly describing her faithful husband, Senchil (Fergal McElherron), as “not born, but knitted on a wet Sunday afternoon”.
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The play offers different possibilities for Portia, but this tricksy protagonist never ignites the audience’s sympathy — or full interest.
“What do you call someone who is no longer a twin?” asks another bereft twin, Judith (Alex Jarrett), in Hamnet. This is Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s historical novel, a plague story that reimagines Shakespeare’s family life.
An episodic first half presents Will’s courtship of Agnes (not Anne here) Hathaway, the birth of a daughter, then twins, and a marriage strained as he courts fortune in London. The tone darkens when Judith, the weaker twin, contracts plague. She survives, but her brother, Hamnet (Ajani Cabey), dies, throwing the family into uncomprehending grief.
Erica Whyman’s RSC production plays out on Tom Piper’s wooden-beamed set, which doubles as a gabled Tudor home and a theatre. It has likeable leads in Agnes (Madeleine Mantock) and William (Tom Varey), with fine support from Peter Wight, as the boorish patriarch John Shakespeare and the actor Will Kempe, and Liza Sadovy as Mary, William’s mother. Cabey (who also plays Hamlet) and Jarrett convince as adult actors playing avid adolescents.
Chakrabarti’s enjoyable theatre-set scenes flag Shakespeare’s use of doubling characters. Hearts should crack at the concluding scene, but while this staging loyally recreates O’Farrell’s characters, it lacks her novel’s emotional impact.
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Portia Coughlan
Almeida, London N1
★★☆☆☆
Hamnet
Garrick Theatre, London WC2
★★★☆☆
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For tickets, visit thetimes.co.uk/tickets
