Dark corners illuminated

In Marina Carr's riveting new play, Redmond ("Red") Raftery - known to his daughters and adult idiot son, Ded, as "Daddy" - runs a malodourous farm on high land sloping down to the river, and sneers at the people in the valley as scrubbers who should come up and take a draught of air up on the hill. But the air on the hill is even more rank: a dead and decaying animal, killed by Red, in every field, the farmyard awash in slurry. And the mud has not stayed on the boots: it has risen to engulf his very soul.

Red seems to spend most of his time out shooting with his friend Isaac, while world-weary daughter, Dinah, minds the house. Burly, dirty, dim Ded lives in the cowshed, coming into the house only to wolf his dinner and smoke a cigarette. Upstairs, Red's mother Shalome sleeps when her mind is not wandering with her back to "Killeygar" to find her dead father and re-discover a life she might have led with an English officer. Only young 18-year-old Sorrell seems normal, courting young Dara Mood from the valley, but Daddy will fix that normality before the night is out.

It is as depressingly black a tale as could be dreamt up for the stage, making even The Beauty Queen of Leenane seem like a light romantic comedy. Even its jokes (and, incredibly, there are many of them) are coarse, harsh and destructive. That we laugh at them at all is because, under Garry Hynes's subtle and assured direction, they are consummately well delivered by the players, not least Tom Hickey's slimy, amoral Red and Kieran Ahern's befuddled Isaac. The wrung-out Dinah played by Cara Kelly gets her shafts home, too, just before we feel the need to bite our tongues, and Valerie Lilley's dotty Shalome charms us wryly every time, before we realise, yet again, how tragic she really is.

Michael Tierney's Ded wins everyone's sympathy without ever letting anyone forget that he is a deadly emotional bomb who might well explode with fatal consequences. Only Mary Murray's young Sorrell - authentically touching before she, too, is driven mad - enables us, along with her increasingly and understandably angry young man, Dara (Keith McErlean), to enter briefly a world approaching normality, morality or sanity.

Tony Walton's setting of the farmhouse kitchen is suitably darkly Disneyesque, superbly lit by Richard Pilbrow, and Monica Frawley's costumes could not be bettered, in what can only be described as a gripping, extraordinary evening of theatre, produced jointly by Druid and the Royal Court. It illuminates some very dark corners of life in the Irish midlands, and the play's scarifying text has been published already by Peter Fallon's redoubtable Gallery Press. Go see. Go buy.

Running in Galway until Saturday, May 13th. Booking: 091-568617. It transfers to the Island Arts from Ireland festival in Washington, DC, next week, then begins a four-week run at the Gate Theatre in Dublin on May 26th, and transfers to The Royal Court, London, on July 3rd