"You're family now." Rarely has this benevolent confirmation been freighted with so much angst and ignominy as in Deirdre Kinahan's haunting family drama.
It is not as though cut-glass Ruth (Rebecca O'Mara) was unaware of the baggage. She married Nial (Rohan Leahy) for goodness sake. She knew his terrible secret and his jailbird past.
But this Chichester girl, intent on fresh starts, could have scarcely imagined how mired in her new husband's dark deed his Dublin family had remained for all these years.
Mum Teresa (Deirdre Donnelly) is a wreck, keen on tea, outward appearances and pill popping, daughter Ciara (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) is fussy and holy in her martyrdom and her sister Niamh (a superlatively fractured Maeve Fitzgerald) is emotionally arrested in her youth, unattainable and bitter.
This is no family reunion round the tea table - it was unwanted and unplanned for a start - but somehow the inevitable attraction that binds families together pulls the siblings on a collision course with the untamed truth.
The fact that Nial is doing well with his art and his fabulous wife only serves to make Niamh's craw all the more receptive to sticky things.
That mum is sick with woe and denial and the Ciara and her husband Dave (Karl Quinn) are delightfully upbeat are the twin forces that ensure Niamh's nose is well and truly rubbed in it.
The sense of tension - of a family ready to blow - is heightened by these cheerful, innocent outsiders who suddenly find themselves caught in a bizarre vortex of familial grief and incrimination. Their inculcation into the tribe and its tribulations is the comic energy of a piece racked with tension.
Poor Fin (Will Joseph Irvine). He plainly has high hopes for his embryonic liaison with Niamh, but no amount of good cheer or upbeat joshing can halt the inexorable tightening of the noose.
This powder keg is ready to blow and when the scalding hurt is finally poured out with the tea the torrent of words and the vitriol find the quickest exit, regardless of the damage.
And when it comes - and goes - the quick recovery to a semblance of normality is the most quietly devastating aspect of the piece.
A taut, anguished drama drawn from a familiar conceit but still shocking and moving nonetheless.
– From March 2011
