Portia Coughlan: a hypnotic Alison Oliver can’t save this absurd Irish melodrama

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There’s no escaping the misery that engulfs Carrie Cracknell’s revival of Marina Carr’s 1996 play about a 30-year-old Irish mother married to money, who can’t recover from the drowning of her twin brother 15 years ago and who staggers through the days in a haze of ginger brandy. It reverberates through the generations of the rural community she comes from, whose various resentments and blood feuds pierce the air just like the glasses hurled across rooms whenever a drink or two has been had. It t