Writer: Karis Kelly
Director: Katie Posner
Before the start we can feast our eyes on a meticulously detailed kitchen set (design by Lily Arnold) with a hallway through an arch, a pair of double doors to a cupboard and a staircase disappearing towards the first floor. Soon an old lady appears, adjusting her dress, with a silly party hat on her head, and sits at the kitchen table where she will remain for most of the 70 minutes, just stirring things up as mayhem explodes around her.
She is Eileen, celebrating her 90th birthday. The place is Northern Ireland. The other women soon gather: Gilly her daughter and, newly arrived after some years in London, Jenny her grand-daughter with her young daughter Muireann. Karis Kelly has written a comedy of the grotesque, of secrets that suddenly emerge, of the door that must not be opened and the telephone that must not be answered, yet all cloaked in crackling comic dialogue.
Katie Posner’s direction for Paines Plough, first seen at the Edinburgh Festival, is unrelenting in pace and volume, sparing nothing in phones hurled against the wall or kitchen drawers emptied over the floor – is it a touch too unrelenting? But she obtains performances of truth and power (and immaculate timing) from all four actors.
Julia Dearden as the indomitable Eileen, foul-mouthed and politically bigoted, spreads an aura of contempt for others all around and enjoys provoking discord, but her own secrets emerge gradually. Andrea Irvine (Gilly), desperately devoted to housework, seems throughout on the brink of hysteria, with her braying laugh and half controlled movements. At first Caoimhe Farren (Jenny) and Muireann Ni Fhaogain (Muireann) seem to bring a touch of sanity to proceedings, Ni Fhaogain’s bemused expression at the shenanigans around her a joy to behold, but that’s before Jenny takes to the bottle and Muireann’s political views emerge.
The result is a tour de force of family and generational resentment, vividly expressed, often raucously funny, but perhaps too manic to convince in the later stages. “Happy birthday to you,” they sing at the end – that probably depends on what you get your happiness from!
Runs until 13th September 2025, before continuing on tour
