“If I say it, things will change between us.” We enter the idiosyncratic “O’Roweland” via his penultimate play, Our Few and Evil Days (2014), under the direction of João Cardoso. In the career of Mark O’Rowe, this text marks the end of a seven-year hiatus since Terminus (2007), a time during which the playwright focused on several adaptations of Shakespeare and Ibsen, as well as on writing TV and film scripts. The monologue as a narration and recollection device, which had been so used by O’Rowe in the previous plays, is here replaced with a symmetrical, concatenated chronological sequence of six scenes, evenly divided into two acts, with a prologue and an interlude. The power of the performances and the cadence of the brief, naturalistic dialogue, now overlapping, now truncated, that animates them, are a means to unveil a past that gnaws away at the characters. Instead of the flood of words of past works, the language is almost ascetic now. This is because a dark secret haunts the family in Our Few and Evil Days: its outlines make themselves visible as details, pauses and silences, like the patterns in a jigsaw puzzle. With a cinematic flair in the way it suspends each scene, develops ellipses and fades-to-black, this family drama about guilt, sacrifice and love possesses the claustrophobic feel of a psychological thriller shot through with a palpable sadness. “Why don’t you love me?”