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Crocodile Fever

 
Max Allen Review by Max Allen 4 Published: 14 Nov 2025 Arcola Theatre Show Dates: 17 Oct 2025-22 Nov 2025

Modern theatre rarely fuses blood, gore, humour and family with such gleeful precision. Meghan Tyler’s Crocodile Fever is a fever dream of sisterly connection and patriarchal dismantling, a hallucinogenic, high-temperature descent that ends in a way I genuinely did not see coming.

A rare, bloody gem that bites hard and lingers

Good writing often follows a formula; one walks into a theatre knowing roughly what to expect. Great writing, however, understands that formula so deeply it can break it with confidence and clarity. Crocodile Fever does exactly that, bending and twisting familiar tropes to create something wild, funny and unpredictable. It is a testament to Tyler’s fluency and command of form.

The play opens in a meticulously detailed Northern Irish home: a kitchen and living room rendered with astonishing realism by Merve Yörük’s set design. Staged in traverse, with audiences on either side, every inch of the space feels deliberate and alive. Realism with onstage props can be as fragile as glass; one mistake and the illusion shatters. Yet through murder, dismemberment, flying debris, crunched crisps and stewing limbs, the veneer never cracks.

The story begins when Fianna (played by Tyler themself) crashes through the window of their sister Alannah’s (Rachael Rooney) pristine home. Alannah wants her gone, but Fianna’s chaotic charm and buried affection eventually win her over. What follows is a drunken night that unearths their traumatic past: a dead mother, a paralysed abusive father and a terrible secret. Alannah started the fire that killed their mother, but Fianna took the blame and served the sentence.

Rooney gives a brilliant, grounded performance with a difficult, stylised character, making Alannah richly human and heartbreakingly funny. Fianna, by contrast, feels less defined, more a gesture toward the archetypal reckless younger sibling than a fully realised character. Some of the play’s political allusions to the IRA and British authorities also feel underdeveloped and tangential to the emotional core, which is the sisters’ relationship.

Stephen Kennedy, as their paralysed father, is a standout. His blood-soaked crawl down the stairs after being shot is both grotesque and magnetic, his performance balancing menace and charm with masterful subtlety.

After a long intermission of around twenty minutes, the play returns for a frantic, surreal final act filled with cooked limbs, deafening music and a life-sized crocodile voiced by Kennedy. The chaos is thrilling, even when not every word can be heard. The extended intermission is understandable given the scale of set changes, but the play might be even stronger without it. Removing narrative elements unrelated to the sisters, their parents or the crocodile (including a well-acted cameo by James Pedley-Holden) could refine the experience into an intense hour of dark sibling discourse set against a backdrop of mayhem and murder, rather than the hour and a half we received.

Despite some pacing issues and narrative excesses, Crocodile Fever remains a bold, brilliantly acted and darkly hilarious piece of theatre. It is a rare, bloody gem that bites hard and lingers.

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The Blurb:

A storm is brewing in a quiet Northern Irish farmhouse…

One sister’s devout, the other’s a disaster. The 80s are in full swing and the past is clawing its way back – ugly, loud, alive.

Written by Irish actor-playwright Meghan Tyler, Crocodile Fever is a riotous dark comedy that refuses to behave. This is sisterhood at full tilt: sharp-tongued and fuelled by Taytos, booze, and buried rage.

After premiering to critical acclaim at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in 2019, the play now makes its London premiere in a brand-new production starring the playwright in the leading role of Fianna. Get ready for chaos and no clean endings.