Crocodile Fever: In-yer-face play from Meghan Tyler

Play review

As I continued my season of theatre, it would be improper to miss a play that has been developed and performed for the Edinburgh Fringe. Crocodile Fever is a play that was written by Meghan Tyler as part of the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe and could be accepted as a representative of the “in-yer-face” tradition. I watched the play in Turkish in Istanbul and then bought and read the play published by the Oberon Press.

The two-act play takes place at the end of the 1980s in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The first act opens in South Armagh in the house of Peter Devlin. Peter’s daughter Alannah has obsessive-compulsive disease and is a devout Christian. While she is cleaning up in her kitchen, her sister Fianna, who has been missing for a long time, rings the bell. When Alannah sees her, she shuts the door in her face and she hides. Fianna manages to enter the house and starts a strained dialogue with Alannah. We find out that Fianna was in jail and she joined the IRA when she was released. She wanted to return home and see her sister when she got the news that her father died. However, the father is not dead and his voice comes from the top floor, to Fianna’s astonishment and reaction. He is now a paraplegic.

In the first act, there is a lot of 80s popular music in the play. This starts with Toto’s Africa and continues throughout the play. There are various wordplays about the music and I could only catch some of these when I read the text (given that it is a translation, it was difficult to get some of the references). Alannah misunderstands the lyrics of Toto’s Africa (she hears it as apricot) and this leads to a funny dialogue about the lyrics. There are references to many popular films as well, including Nightmare on Elm Street, Carrie and Jaws. Some of the audience might miss these references depending on their age.

From the two sisters’ dialogue, we understand that their mother died when the house burned down and that Fianna went to jail for the act, but it was in reality Alannah who burned the house and Fianna was trying to protect her. Fianna has read a book about the Asmat Tribe living around the Amazon River when she was in jail. This tribe is in trouble with gigantic alligators. They believe that these alligators, who seem to catch a few of the tribe all the time and eat them, seem to be reincarnations of evil souls who have brought evil to the tribe in the past and that the only way to get rid of these evil souls is to catch them and kill them.

Fianna goes out towards the end of the first act and comes back with a chainsaw. Here we have to remember what Chekov famously said: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired”. This works for chainsaws as well…

Here, although it is not clearly stated, there is the implication of sexual harassment between the father and the daughters. At this point, the play, which was progressing quite humorously, suddenly transforms into a bloodbath with revenge taking place and the evil souls of the past being exorcised.

Some of the themes are hilarious like Alannah preparing drinks with exaggerated formality and protecting the chips she eats when she’s sad (“Sad chips”) with her life.

In the performance I watched, the actresses playing Fianna and Alannah were quite impressive, although I would have liked to watch the play in English with an Irish accent.

You can watch the short interview with the author (Meghan Tyler) and two actors right after the Edinburg Fringe in 2019, in this video.

I believe that every subject can be covered in theatre. Crocodile Fever is a play worthy of your time, covering sins and secrets in the family, with a bit of black humour.