An obsessive, explosive, pent-up, angry, fist-ready, expletive-undeleted Irish boy has a job in a furniture warehouse, in the store-room, hefting large items into the back of lorries. He is determined one day to be a salesman upstairs, wafting graciously among the customers; and one further day afterwards to make the business his own.
     When he reaches those dizzy heights – it does not take him long, so frantic and frenzied his ambition; and he does not balk at anything (nauseatingly) to do it – he is able to take his revenge on the people he learned to hate as he worked his way up.
    During his strivings to succeed, indeed just at the point when he seems ready to crest the wave, he marries, and has a daughter. One sunny blissful day the mother and daughter go to the seaside, and laugh in the sunshine. The daughter goes for a walk, and falls into a sewerage tank. As a result she contracts polio, and is crippled; she is then aged just ten.
    The angry, obsessive, maddened father's reaction to this disaster is to immure her and her mother in their house, building more and more partition walls around them until finally they are imprisoned on a bed in a tiny space. There, after some years, the mother dies. Meanwhile the father has killed at least two, and perhaps three, people in the process of fulfilling his obsessive dream of being a furniture-shop magnate: one by burning him to death, another by slitting his throat with a Stanley knife, the possible third by beating his head on the floor. The latter two are the effects of rage at things not working out in his business. He links the crippling of his child, and his gathering ill-luck and failure in business, with the suave and hateful high-quality furniture dealer who undermines his own down-market endeavours.
    And all this richness of occurrence, all these awful events, are acted out through overlapping monologues, on a bed, by two crazed and despairing people, one physically and both mentally crippled by the circumstances they relate, their stream of memory and pain spewing from them like vomit.
    This machine-gun fast, relentless, bomb-blast emeticism of a play is challenging, unpleasant to sit through, but utterly gripping. It makes for an excoriating hour in the Royal Court's upstairs space, which is intimate on occasions, wonderfully and effectively oppressive in the presence of this kind of suffering. The play begins with a wall crashing down to reveal the crippled girl and her bitterly demented father trapped on the bed which is what their world has shrunk to. On it they recall and act out the chapters in the claustrophobic anguish of their lives. Tracing a perfect arc of catharsis, the struggle between them, which mirrors and fuels the struggle within, ends with a sudden resolution into tenderness: she kisses him on the forehead, which is streaked with the blood of the man he killed in a rage and who had been his longest-serving and most faithful employee; and he kisses her on the forehead in return.
     Liam Carney and Norma Sheahan are perfectly cast and give brilliant performances, Sheahan's eyes rolling into her head and showing their whites whenever she strives not to tip into insanity, Carney rabid and frenetic, giving a masterly rendition of a man in the wilderness of darkness on the far side of obsession and rage.
AC Grayling