Sidling on in a dressing gown, with a series of stop-start musical intros, Aisling Bea affects an air of goofy spontaneity and reactive chaos, her mile-a-minute, chatty delivery in keeping with the (not altogether unsurprising) ADHD diagnosis she received during the Covid pandemic.
Regardless of whether this attire is an elaborate callback to her 2022 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s chat show, after an airline lost her luggage, and a screen career that has taken the Irish comic to Hollywood, when she resumes after a set from support act Dom McGovern, she’s in total control.
More than a decade after her last live show, the creator-star of acclaimed Channel 4 comedy-drama This Way Up has come back to stand-up with a bravura blend of writing and performance, the former aspect markedly more ambitious and reflective than when she first broke through.
Beginning at the beginning, Older Than Jesus recounts how the comic and her younger sister were raised in Kildare by a single mother and extended matriarchy following her father’s death, and the confused part Catholicism played in providing her with a substitute male role model and sex education.
Times were tough enough, evidenced by the home-made, religious twist that the family jerry-rigged for the school lunch box staple of Dairylea Lunchables. But Bea seems to have always been a committed observer with a creative imagination. And she revels in sending up Church ritual and her youthful enthusiasm as she dutifully comports through her zealous adherence to bell-ringing. Or evokes the church caretaker as an amiable but creepy grotesque. The doctrine of transubstantiation she mocks with the wide-eyed innocence of a former true believer, maintaining a more-or-less straight face as she lets the pious nonsense condemn itself.
In accord with her attention-demanding, constant animation, Bea is distinguished at distorting herself, whether physically, recreating the chronic pain she’s endured after a series of accidents. Or in her tactful equivocating when hearing about her family’s spotted history on Who Do You Think You Are? The act outs are often wildly extravagant and cartoonishly sublime, with an hallucinogenic encounter with her late father a case in point, weirdly touching in its ridiculousness.
In the well-stitched tapestry of ignorance that Bea has unpicked and hard-earned wisdom that she’s belatedly acquired, she reveals that her becoming a mother was an accident, the father of her daughter simply the latest musician to have ensnared her with his own arrested development.
But she also recalls her sister’s antenatal class to challenge gender norms around parenting. And though she’s completely attuned to the most mortifying aspects and sheer indignities of pregnancy and delivery, with the theatrical intensity of her C-section playing to her strength of vividly painting a picture, she arrives at unsentimental conclusions about motherhood. The serious points that she caps the frivolous with feel less of a tonal shift and more organic as a result. Older Than Jesus is instinctively daft but rich storytelling nonetheless.
Tours until 3 May 2026 | Image: Contributed
