‘Portia Coughlan’ is a beautiful drama rich with secrets and mourning

“I HAVE been wanting to direct Marina Carr’s tragic play, ‘Portia Coughlan’, for a very long time, and now I am finally doing it,” remarks director Anne O’Connell of Rathfarnham Theatre Group.

It is Portia Coughlan’s 30th birthday, but she has little to celebrate.

Haunted by the tragic drowning of her twin brother 15 years earlier, she drifts sorrowfully through a world suspended somewhere between the living and the dead.

The result is a tormented space separating her emotionally from her husband, her children, and an enviable life that could have been.

As Portia navigates her way through this landmark birthday, defined by yearning and loss, she is guided by a spectral presence determined to lead her back to a disturbing past and to some dangerous unfinished business.

‘Portia Coughlan’ is a play that digs deeply and quietly into the darkest corners of grief and dysfunction.

Peopled by a cast of eccentric and darkly humorous characters, Marina Carr brings us right into the heart of a midlands Irish town.

She draws us into a rich landscape where layers of secrets and lies continue to throw their long and awful shadow.

To Anne, it is one of Marina Carr’s “best plays”, written in the 90s, a “beautiful bleak Irish drama rich with secrets and mourning”.

This is a tragedy wrought from bitterness that has been around for generations and left to fester, with “violence and loss seeping into every interaction.”

Rathfarnham Theatre Group (RTG) is a dynamic and innovative community-based drama group which has been bringing live theatre to audiences in Rathfarnham and surrounding areas for the last 33 years.

Their membership brings together people from all walks of life who have a passion for theatre and who are committed to promoting arts and culture in their local community.

They usually stage two full-length plays each year in the dlr Mill Theatre Dundrum and also perform shorter theatrical pieces in venues in Rathfarnham, including the Pearse Museum and Rathfarnham Castle.

For further information, please see their website at rathfarnhamtheatre.com.

Be sure to get tickets to see their production of ‘Portia Coughlan’, which performs in the dlr Mill Theatre in Dundrum from November 18 to 22.

Each performance starts at 7:30pm; don’t miss out.