Crocodile Fever

I saw Crocodile Fever at the Lyric yesterday and I had the feeling I had seeing David Ireland’s Cyprus Avenue a couple of years ago, the feeling that I’d witnessed SOMETHING, an event: a wild and flashy statement of intent. Crocodile Fever sticks with you like the smell of smoke on clothes, cigarettes and lighter fuel on fingers. It is incendiary.

A Reptile Disfunction. 

You think you have this. I sat down at the start and watched Lucianne McEvoy as Allanah tease easy laughs out of the crowd by cleaning the hob with a toothbrush and lighting a josstick like a votive candle to disguise the smell of her smoking.  Her sister bursts in, singing drunk, with the inevitable question regarding the whereabouts of the craic. We’re then served twenty minutes of “we’re really very different people” badinage, batted back and forth across the kitchen like a shuttlecock. So that’s what this is, I thought, right. That isn’t what this is.  

While Allanah is out of the room her sister casually produces a gun from a bag. The gun is seemingly thrown away, except a gun can never just be thrown away. (Except in a Western where the hero is shooting and he runs out of bullets and he just throws the gun to the ground in frustration? How cheap were guns in the Old West? Could you get one free with the three sarsaparilla labels?) She hears a frog ribbit and she talks to the portrait of her mother.

Okay.   

There are some glaring anachronisms in this play. People didn’t get their “five a day” in 80’s Ireland. I don’t think they said “End of story”, either. But given the phantasmagorical nature of the text I’m going to assume that these are used on purpose. The whole has the logic of a fever dream.

Fianna (Lisa Dwyer Hogg) plays a cassette of Toto’s Africa on a tape-deck that the sister’s deceased mother bought in an uncharacteristic display of indulgence. (There is a shrine to the deceased mother centre stage for the entire play and, with a tight spot-light and a truncated version of Madonna’s Like a Prayer, she is the very first thing we see). And I thought that’s disappointing. Africa by Toto is a monster, it is a Memelord. It’s a lazy weren’t-the-eighties-fun-shoulder-pads-and-deeley-boppers-and-spacedust kind of thing. It’s an easy laugh.

 That is not what this is.

Instead Allanah’s inspired mondegreen opens her character up completely. It is the beginning of the erosion of the sisters invention of themselves, their identities forged in adversity: Fianna is expansive, always pushing out, forever restless.  Allanah contracts building defensive walls around herself, numbing the pain with repetition and ritual. Following her insane and brilliant reinvention of the soft rock classic we find that the sisters have a point of commonality, that they are more like one another than they are willing to admit.

But that’s not what this play is about.

The girls continue to argue and Fianna, in a moment of rum fuelled madness, powders Allanah’s entire supply of “sadness crisps” (Tayto gets a laugh every time its mentioned) and standing suddenly upright she bolts up the stairs and a shot is fired. There is a frozen moment, on stage and in the audience. McEvoy’s underplaying of the line “Right” is masterful, as is the conversation about the weather that ensues when Fianna reappears, stiff with shock. (The line “Clouds are needed” made me laugh out loud). The girl’s father Pete (Sean Kearns) has been upstairs for the entire play, rumbling and shaking the house to its foundations like the Old Testament Yahweh, a mythologised brute, a monster living in the sky demanding tribute. As he enters the scene, crawling on his belly, while the sisters do an oblivious dance routine, we see that he is the titular reptile, hare-eyed and twitching, dangerous even on his belly.

All the actors are brilliant. Sean Kearn’s Peter is a seductive beast as well as a predatory monster. Even incapacitated and bleeding into an arm chair he is a honey-tongued patriarchal devil, his gravel voiced insinuations seemingly undimmed by blood loss. Lisa Dwyer Hogg’s gun woman on the run is wild eyed and big haired and desperate for reconciliation with her ruined, shut-in big sister. Lucianne McEvoy’s Allanah has the longest journey, from corseted prisoner of the kitchen (“This is a hairstyle of efficiency”) to a fully paid up member of the Bacchae, red in tooth and hair and ready to truly “eat her pain”. McEvoy is extraordinary. I’d be hurling awards at her off the back of this performance if I had any to give. She inhabits every part of this rich and complicated role completely: a remarkable feat of acting.    

This has been three or four plays thus far. It continues to evolve, changing into other exciting, extraordinary things. Writer Meghan Tyler pulls off something quite extraordinary here. The play is sprawling and vast, it is bold and ambitious and sort of ridiculous, complete with a diabolos ex machina. But it is brilliantly measured. It satisfies. The foundations are so surely dug that the teetering edifice remains secure. She gets away with this brilliantly. It’s rare that you come out of the theatre as excited by what is possible. And I felt that utterly. Gareth Nicholl’s direction is smart and assured throughout, managing the changes of tone expertly, even as the play becomes darker, wilder, stranger and more fabulous.

I’m obviously not going to spoil the ending though I’d be very impressed if I could do it any damage at all. But you’ll have a chance to see this again somewhere. It would be madness to let this thing disappear after yesterday’s matinee. And not the right kind of madness, the kind this play revels in.