Bold claim: Fair Deal isn’t just a play about housing inefficiencies; it’s a volcanic, black-comic confrontation with family ties, money, and power that roars to life on a claustrophobic stage. But here’s where it gets controversial: the house itself becomes a full-blown character, and that choice reshapes how we read every scene that follows.
Abbey Theatre’s Fair Deal, staged on the Peacock beside Dublin’s Abbey, begins as a seemingly lighthearted family comedy before spiraling into a riotous, dark farce. Liam Doona’s design work makes this possible—the set is not merely a backdrop but a living, breathing space that carries all the family’s history and tensions. Its worn corners, porcelain dogs, a garish painting, and a ceremonial but hollow barometer all hint at the weight of generations pressing down on the present.
Una McKevitt’s new play opens with the Mateo-like air of a domestic sitcom, as Kiera Thornton (Caroline Menton) negotiates a looming crisis with her boyfriend Rio (Jack Weise). The crumbling family home, left to Kiera by her grandmother, becomes the financial pivot around which the drama revolves: she visits an uncle with a terminal condition, and she’s preparing to sell the house. Her brother Daragh (Garrett Lombard), a working actor with a string of modest successes, drops by with a curry, just as the sick man is about to be moved into care.
What starts as a tidy family comedy quickly veers into something more muscular when Sandra, Kiera’s mother, bursts in with a For Sale sign clutched like a weapon. Sandra is a glamorous, cutthroat former interior designer-turned-celebrity who now inhabits a sunlit, moneyed nightmare of luxury—everything硬 is gold, everything soft is camel—that tears into her children and her brother with gleeful ferocity. “I’ve always liked houses; you can impose yourself on them,” she snarls, laying bare the line between taste and control.
McGuckin embodies Sandra with ferocious relish, signaling a tonal shift that eventually upends the play’s carefully calibrated realism. The show tilts into melodrama, demanding that the audience accept an almost surreal pivot. The shift is risky—Daragh and Kiera react too readily to the new unreality, as if guests at a table where the hosts suddenly reveal they’ve brought aliens for tea. Yet the gamble pays off: the ensemble leans into the bloody comic reversals with a discipline that echoes the sharp, darkly comic energy of Joe Orton’s plays. Lombard revels in a delicious vanity; Menton holds a steady moral compass amid the storm; Weise sparkles with a malign, knowing glint; and McGuckin, in the title role, crafts a pantomime villain who feels timeless and terrifying.
The production’s humor is unabashed and gleeful, with the shifting mood serving a larger social critique about housing, responsibility, and the cost of keeping up appearances. While some of the more serious themes risk getting swept up in the frenzy, the overall effect is a rollicking, unforgettable night at the theatre.
Fair Deal thrives on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, with performances running until Saturday, March 28.
