Performer: Aoife Dunne
In anticipation of Aoife Dunne’s comedy show Good Grief, the Town Hall Theatre in Galway city is heaving with excited bodies. Seating is unallocated and the show is sold out so there is a relaxed atmosphere with patrons availing of the bar and having the craic. Dunne cranks up the vibe as soon as she appears on stage, engaging with audience members brave enough to make themselves known to her. Daniel from Connemara gets an unmerciful slagging about his boyfriend potential – or lack thereof – while a Brazilian and a Serbian become her female reference points for various gags. An unfortunate American man is pilloried because, well, he’s American. Dunne is clearly very excited to be back in her home county, she hails from a small town, Kinvara, approximately 30 km from Galway city and she elicits an enthusiastic response when she enquires about who is from the locality. While there is obviously great support for her from this contingent, her fans come from literally far and wide and are not limited to the female of the species: there are plenty of men attending, to her stated surprise.
After back and forths with the audience (though Kelly from Kinvara continues to engage throughout) Dunne begins her more scripted element of the show: a hilarious and wickedly relatable account of her travels in Brazil – where she spends some painful hours with a Ukrainian beauty therapist in order to meet Brazilian beach aesthetics – segues into her having to cut short her journey when her mother unexpectedly dies; an event that generates her show’s theme of grieving and of how coping with grief can be so difficult and life-altering. The contrasting light and dark content in Dunne’s story shouldn’t work but it does, almost always. She is a brilliant comedian with a kinetic physical presence which extends to her facial expressions. The gags are mostly related to the female experience, as Dunne acknowledges, but transcend specificity because they are just very funny and, as she emphasises that everything in the show really happened, they are universally relatable. Who has not experienced a version of those excruciatingly embarrassing dating experiences explored by Dunne here in very graphic detail.
As Dunne alternates between comedy and tragedy, at times the more sombre sections lack the nuance and realism of the comedy and for this reason can fall a little flat. However the format makes for an interesting and different approach to the comedy genre. Dunne gives a lot of herself in the performance, she is brutally honest and self-deprecating, with a killer joke around every hard-hitting corner (best joke of the evening involved Irish women’s repressed grief, orgasms and exorcisms – just brilliant). The exploration of real issues such as self-hatred and its manifestation in destructive coping mechanisms, such as inappropriate sexual partners who do nothing for her self-esteem, are deftly interspersed with hilarious anecdotes and paeons to female friendship. Much humour is found in Irish peculiarities, not least attempts by those American and English boyfriends to pronounce ‘Aoife’ and the quirky nature of Irish funeral wakes. Dunne’s ability to vividly portray these events recognisably while milking them for their humour is a strong element in her work. Given that comedy festival events had been on all day in the city, the audience had the potential to be a little jaded at this stage of the evening but Dunne kept everyone on her side throughout. She comes across as warm, enthusiastic and professional, a performer who has found her niche; hopefully we get more in a similar vein from this talented comedian in the future.
Reviewed on 26th Oct 2025.
