Emma Doran may have broken out on TikTok but WhatsApp is her spiritual home. Embarking on her first UK tour, the breezily frank Dubliner relishes a conspiratorial gossip and doesn’t really go in for discretion. Breakdowns, one-night stands, even the spectre of child abduction, if Doran is privy to it in the communal chat, it’s gleefully shared on stage.
To a degree, she’s living vicariously through others. After recently turning 40, she can’t throw herself into nocturnal revelry like she used to. And Dilemma is coloured by nostalgia and an appealing lack of guilt about her wilder days, her efforts to resist time’s encroachment exemplified by the spell she falls under whenever she hears her favourite Pussycat Dolls song.
Yet this lively, garrulous show also reflects the fact that she became pregnant at 18 and is a mother-of-three. There’s a strong sense of someone belatedly spreading their wings in her stand-up, most strikingly in her slights upon her more restrained 21-year-old daughter, her mother, her circle of friends and most damningly, her partner.
Slagging off loved ones with such arch snippiness and remaining likeable requires a certain finesse. And Doran is a master in this regard, with her routines riding a simmering, subtextual undercurrent of resentment at others’ relative freedom. One of the most memorable expressions of her internal dilemmas pitches the titanic struggle between her need to occasionally cut loose of an evening with her desire to “get ahead of herself” and finish all her household chores, her inability to do both expressed in her angsty, on-stage animation.
Doran aims for relatability and accomplishes it, but doesn’t inhibit the darkness in her soul. She forges connections with the crowd by voicing the bleaker, subconscious recesses of a harassed woman in middle-age, rather than overtly playing to the gallery. Beginning the show proper after her opening introduction, she airs the familiar stand-up thought that plenty in the audience won’t have sought to be there but were dragged along as someone else’s plus one. Yet she twists the cliché into the most grudging, snarky tribute to those responsible types, those necessary evils who organise a friendship group, witheringly deriding them as the “Sandras”.
Likewise, her generalisations about the sexes are laced with cuttingly original observations. If her unnamed and lightly sketched partner serves as a bit of a punchbag, she nevertheless convinces you that he’s getting off lightly as she fantasises about him dying or coming home to find her embracing late in life lesbianism.
The uproariously funny peak of a consistently entertaining show, this section also finds her personifying her boobs and vagina, as well as penises for good measure, with some hilariously vivid characterisation. For all this whimsical devilment though, she’s careful to denounce body shaming and very much makes herself the butt of the joke for theoretically flirting with homosexuality, testing the patience of her gay friend and mocking any holiday dilettantes lauding themselves as bisexual following a single drunken snog.
Doran’s penultimate routine, about appearing on the competition show Ireland’s Fittest Family, doubtless gains from familiarity with the bargain basement, Gladiators-style physical challenges. Yet she evokes her struggles on it with a committed enough verve to convey it for a UK crowd.
And she ends on another winning tale lifted out of her WhatsApp, an arresting little playlet of human interaction that explodes into mob hysteria and exploitation that she feasts upon with enthusiasm, conveying it with the same giddy excitement that she felt first reading it. Dilemma is a cracking first foray to these shores for a fiercely accomplished and fully formed talent.
Continues touring | Image: Contributed
