On Raftery's Hill ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L to R) Michael Tierney as Ded, Mary Murray as Sorrel, Valerie Lilley as Shalome, Tom Hickey as Red

Production photography by Derek Spiers

Direction: Garry Hynes Design: Tony Walton Costume: Monica Frawley Lighting: Richard Pilbrow Sound: Rich Walsh Music: Paddy Cunneen. Cast: Kieran Ahern, Tom Hickey, Cara Kelly, Valerie Lilley, Keith McErlean, Mary Murray, Michael Tierney

From Town Hall, Galway:

“Marina Carr’s follow-up to By the Bog Of Cats eschews the widescreen style of its predecessor to pull an ultra-tight focus on one mutated social organism apparently determined to perpetuate and even replicate its heinous structures. If the rumours are to be believed, Red Raftery (Tom Hickey), the coarse patriarch of a midland farm, possesses a bite every bit as bad as his bark. He’s been spotted attacking his own cattle with a knife, while even his friends cheerfully tell tales of his causal barberism. His elder daughter, Dinah (Cara Kelly), seems more like a browbeaten wife than a daughter, while the young one, Sorrel (Mary Murray), can’t yet focus and articulate the danger she is in, though she’ll soon gain that ability…

“The writing throughout stylishly blends urban and Greek myth with tremendous precision, confidently soaring off into stratospheric riffs, then fearlessly tumbling into the pigsty. Carr has never written better dialogue. Her words sit well in everybody’s mouth, but Tom Hickey’s monster, Red, has the vile crackle of a special villian…

“She interests herself in a society gone cancerous, reproducing itself through the diseased workings of the most selfish of all genes, going on forever simply because its amoral momentum has becomone unstoppable. Nobody on Carr’s hill can apply the breaks, not because they don’t know how, but because of their unspeakable, self-destructive attraction to freewheeling downhill every faster.”

Luke Glancy THE TIMES 16 May

“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’ subtle and assured direction, they are consumately well delivered by the players, not least Tom Hickey’s slimy, amoral Red and Kieran Ahern’s befuddled Isaac…

“Tony Walton’s setting of the farmhouse kitchen is suitably darly Disneyesque … in what can only be described as a gripping, extraodrinary evening of theatre. It illuminates some very dark corners of life in the Irish midlands … Go see. Go buy.”

David Nowlan IRISH TIMES 11 May

“If Marina Carr’s plays have been dark before this, she has descended into hell with On Raftery’s Hill. The play is relentless: the flesh crawls, the hairs rise on the back of the neck, the throat closes in panic. And through the seismic horror comes the explosive artistry of the born playwright. Carr takes us inside the minds, and even into the bodies, it seems, of men and women whose sufferings have been the stuff of dramatic court cases; but the measured language of lawyers, even the crucified languageof the victims of this particular hell, have never painted the picture as Carr does…

“Garry Hynes directs the play with driving, merciless precision. And the cast rises magnificently to the dark task: there is not a flicker wrong in any of the unyielding performances… This is a play that howls to be seen; its courage is matched only by its dramatic power.”

Emer O’Kelly SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 14 May

From Royal Court, London:

“Marina Carr’s bleak and ferocious play is set on a remote Irish hillside, where a gun-toting famer Daddy on the skids has molested both his daughters. Old Raftery, played madly and brilliantly by Tom Hickey ste sbaout his second daughter (Mary Murray) as though he was gutting a rabbit. The elder daughter, beautifully and quietly played by Cara Kelly, confesses to a regular liason in the dark. These are unspeakable matters in Ireland, or anywhere. But they are touched upon with blazing dramatic poetry in a production by Garry Hynes that is riveting from start to finish…

“Incest is a hot topic. The Greeks had a word for it, and it was tragedy. This is emotionally retarded, socially injured Catholic Ireland, and the cultural legacy, and probably its reality, is still very much in evidence. Marina Carr picks up where Eugene O’Neill left off… The past is still the present in this play. And you just wonder what other horrors might be masked in lives of apparently abject normality.”

Michael Coveney DAILY MAIL 4 July