The Dry House 
Marylebone Theatre, London 

 
ONE early morning in Newry, Northern Ireland, Claire, a middle-aged woman at the end of her tether, tries to corral her fallen-apart sister, Chrissy, towards the door of a local drying-out clinic. 

Chrissy is in the desperate end stages of alcoholism, almost at a point of no return, and as they sit in her small, shambolic front room (gas fire, piles of clothes, curtains not opened in months), her sibling attempts to persuade her to make the move towards redemption. 

As she does so, the lyrical dialogue created by writer and director Eugene O’Hare suggests that it’s not just Chrissy but her wider community that has an alcohol problem — that those who are not already a slave to the bottle are either worried that they have “the drinking gene” or are paying the price for the drinking behaviour of others.