Theatre review: Portia Coughlan

One of those instances where I probably should have trusted my instincts, rather than booking everything at the Almeida to make the most of my membership, I definitely had a feeling Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan might not be my thing. As it turns out the only thing I can find fault with in Carrie Cracknell's production is the choice of play itself - Carr's 1996 tragedy certainly has some things to say about the expectations for women even at the end of the 20th century, but the way it does so is so relentlessly grim it qualifies for this year's occasional theatrical meme of misery porn. It follows the titular Portia (Alison Oliver) on the day of her thirtieth birthday, a day she spends the same way as the previous 15 years: Haunted, metaphorically and perhaps literally, by her twin brother Gabriel, who drowned himself the day after their 15th birthday.

Rehearsed reading review: Girl on an Altar

Alongside the more finished works that have been appearing online during the last year of lockdown, it's perhaps surprising that more rehearsed readings haven't also been on the menu - perhaps theatres have been too busy trying to ensure they can eventually reopen their doors, to spend much time trying out the shows they hope to put on when they do. But if the latest in a long line of promises actually turns out true there might be light at the end of the tunnel, and Marina Carr’s new play Girl on an Altar is one Indhu Rubasingham hopes to add to a future Kiln season. So she and Susie McKenna direct a one-off reading that was live-streamed tonight from the Kiln stage, and in a companion piece to her Hecuba, Carr returns to the aftereffects of the Trojan War to look at the Greek side of the story. The play focuses on the first major murder of the Oresteia, but like Robert Icke she first looks back ten years to the inciting event: The sacrifice of Iphigenia.

Theatre review: Hecuba

While the Almeida's spent the summer giving us radical rewrites of Greek classics, the RSC has cut Euripides out of the picture altogether and, in what would probably have been a more accurate description of Icke's Oresteia and Cusk's Medea as well, commissioned Marina Carr to write an entirely new play based on the legend - in this case, that of Hecuba. There's a lot of dead children in this story too but Hecuba (Derbhle Crotty) isn't as okay with this as Medea: A mother of eighteen and the former queen of Troy, as the play begins the city has just been taken after ten years of war, and she's not yet quite understood the "former" part of her title. The Greeks have demanded that no male Trojans be left alive, and as most of her children were sons, she sits in her throne room surrounded by their dismembered bodies. Taking comfort from her two remaining children, she stands up to the triumphant Agamemnon (Ray Fearon.)