Theatre review: Our Few and Evil Days at Abbey Theatre
And that twist is a seductive, subdued tension spiked deliciously with a dramatic left-turn. The play centres on a middle-class Dublin family (dad Ciarán Hinds, mum Sinead Cusack and adult daughter Charlie Murphy) haunted by a deep hurt. But this hauntedness morphs into something stranger, testifying to the ways in which grief can transform everyday life.
From the opening moments, when a drowsy Hinds puts a sofa-bed back together with ritualistic attention, the play invests everything with the evocative. The ability to evoke or to invoke is the power of the ghost story, but also the power of theatre itself. Here, it is the key to understanding the play’s narrative, but O’Rowe’s emphasis on the evocative also hampers the play somewhat, with the narrative’s evasive subtlety a little too pronounced.
