Deirdre O’Kane seldom plays the UK outside of London and the Edinburgh Fringe, so this tour represents a rare opportunity for many people to catch the gifted storyteller in her element.
Drolly introducing herself with various euphemisms, the Irish stand-up economically conveys that although she’s beyond the age of having further children, she’s still very much interested in sex, both in terms of “the ride” itself and its wider significance for men and women in heterosexual relationships.
Men’s problems are very much in the news right now with the debate surrounding Adolescence on Netflix. And although O’Kane doesn’t offer anything radical in her observations on their emotional constipation and deflection, she’s dryly funny in the laboured dialogues that she imagines struggling through with some of her troubled male acquaintances.
She also contrasts the post-coital doziness that men enjoy with the industrious life admin that women begin once a “load” has been “shot”.In this one-sided, domestic battle of the sexes, O’Kane steals a march with multiple online purchases while her enemy still slumbers, a fait accompli between the sheets.
She’s reminiscent of an act like Jo Caulfield, who has similarly relatable, exasperated routines about pub conversations with middle-aged blokes who would rather take refuge in sport and trivia than discuss anything of true personal import.
Yet O’Kane goes further, taking a geopolitical perspective, projecting her theories onto the so-called strongman posturing of Netanyahu, Putin and Trump, while finding a twinkle in her eye for Volodymyr Zelensky.
Indeed, while she leans into the gentle, roguish naughtiness and garrulousness of a middle-aged woman who isn’t defined by motherhood, she doesn’t pull her punches where toxic masculinity is concerned. She outright damns Russell Brand, before calling out Woody Allen in a routine that she acknowledges sacrifices the tension release of punchlines in favour of hard truths.
Still, in her soul, O’Kane is an engaging yarn-spinner rather than a tubthumping polemicist. And her account of her son’s possessiveness towards her when he was younger adroitly balances wry affection with clear-eyed acceptance of the red flags present.
She also pays tribute to the storyteller’s craft and injects a little frisson into the portrayal of her marriage by suggesting that the infidelity fantasies which she and her husband indulge in may or may not be real. In spite of her candid nature, she still requires a little privacy too.
Time and again you’re impressed by O’Kane’s ambition and willingness to couch difficult subject matter such as collective trauma in an affable, open manner. The “notions” she gets that she might have some sophisticated French ancestry is the starting point for her to recall her Catholic boarding school adolescence, schooled by one particularly vengeful nun in particular.
Although the story is detailed, funny and doesn’t portray anyone in caricature, she extrapolates the underlying inflexibility of her education onto the twisted treatment of “fallen” women in Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries, satirising the cruel religious system that could conceive such vindictive and yet weirdly corporate punishment. Imploring the crowd to come with her on this leap of association, she’s mocking genuine darkness on the back of what was otherwise a tale about illicit teenage smoking.
Thereafter, O’Kane is canny enough to leaven this bleakness with the entertaining, if mildly mortifying tale (at least for her daughter) of how she hooked up with her husband in an unlikely, Friends-style arrangement.
And she ends on the disaster-filled account of their wedding day, when everything that might have gone wrong, did go wrong. Incredulous and witty on the gap between her romantic ideals and the reality, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to witness O’Kane revisit the horror.
Tours until 19 December 2025 in Ireland and 12 April 2025 for the UK | Image: Contributed
