Figures on a dark landscape

THE landscape of Marina Carr's plays is both literally and metaphorically. Her Midlands' ground is soft underfoot, boggy and unstable, bounded by lakes' and rivers. And the language of her characters flows with the same lazy meander, words oozing into each other until the distinctions between them are blurred, and all the hard, clear consonants are drowned.

At the start of her new play at the Peacock, Portia Coughlan, a factory owner (Sean Rocks) slips home in the morning to see his wife, the eponymous Portia, already working her way through a bottle of brandy. He says "Tin a clache i'tha mornin' an ya'are ah ud arready." Normal speech is so slurred that it becomes impossible to tell drunk from sober. The words, like the landscape, are flat and slow, and they suck you down into treacherous depths.

And both landscape and speech belong to the wider set of metaphors that hold the play together, images in which clear distinctions keep breaking down. Portia and her twin brother Gabriel are still locked together, as they were in the womb, even though he drowned himself in the river 15 years before, on their joint 15th birthday.

And in that awful psychic entanglement, the borders between the living and the dead, between male and female, between the born and the unborn, between the past and the present, dissolve in the river's interminable flow. The dead boy and the living woman are the same person, a single personality that has been sundered and, that can of be made whole again by Portia s death.

It is terribly unsteady ground for a piece of theatre to stand on. If the basic oppositions by which we understand the world cannot be taken for granted, then clearly the simple rules of cause and effect that drive most plays cannot be maintained. It takes great courage to go out on stage without them and even greater skill to make it work. With great direction, and acting of extraordinary coherence it does. The play becomes a dark and difficult passage over ground that constantly seems about to give way, but one that does reach some commanding heights.

As in her last play, The Mai, Carr is concerned with the notion of family lines, and stretches the story over four generations. And that story is unremittingly bleak. Though Portia Coughlan draws most openly on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (Portia's name, the fact that she comes from Belmont, her choice between suitors), its tragedy is much more Greek than Shakespearean.

This is the world of Aeschylus and Sophocles in which a course of action is set in motion in the distant past and works its way on relentingly through the present. Portia has never really entered the world at all, but remains trapped in the womb of the past, where there's no brathin' no thinkin' no seein', on'y darcheness an' heart drums ..."

Just in case the audience might have any illusions of escape, Car places the chronological ending of the action in the middle of the play, cutting off all hope. What we watch thereafter is a kind, of psychic autopsy a cold delving into the soft tissues of Portia's mind to discover and pluck out the cause of death the knotty, incestuous society of a rural Ireland that has seldom been painted in such dark colours.

To act the part of someone who knows from the start that she is doomed and helpless is a ferocious challenge for Derbhle Crotty as Portia, and in meeting it she shows again why she is such a superb resource for playwrights of daring. Here she combines ferocity with vulnerability, lightning intelligence with dark self destructiveness, to give off the angry, hopeless energy of a bee, trapped in a bottle.

That energy is essential, for if Portia once settles into any single emotional mode, the play would sink under its own weight. Crotty, is able to remake the mood from moment to moment, to flow like the Belmont River that marks the limit of Portia's life, and to carry the play along with her.

This achievement is consistent with everything else in Garry Hynes's brilliant production. Knowing that there is no clear line of cause and effect to thread through the play, Hynes holds instead to the language. Instead of reacting against the indistinct, blurry quality of the speech, she works with it to fashion a style in which there are few full stops. Using the freedom of Kandis Cook's minimalist design, and a very few props, she draws the play away from its roots in naturalism and towards a vivid poetry of movement in which places and actions melt into each other.

In this style, neither the difficulty of the speech nor the bleakness if the story is in any way mitigated or softened. On the other hand, going all the way with what is inherent in the play produces performances that are not just individually admirable but also full of collective integrity. It is rare to see a play cast with such depth (Tom Hickey, Des Keogh, Stella McCusker, Pauline Flanagan and Marion O'Dwyer proving the adage that there are no minor roles, only minor actors), even rarer to see all the actors so closely attuned to each other and to the play.

The result is never easy and always grim. But it has, like the boggy landscape on which it is set a harsh, heavy beauty all of its own.