Mustard – Arcola Theatre, London

Writer: Eva O’Connor

Director: Hildegard Ryan

Mustard, written and performed by Eva O’Connor, is a surreal, funny monologue which holds you riveted throughout. O’Connor’s writing is strong, rich and wittily poetic. She captures a whole variety of moods from the deeply erotic to agonising despair. O’Connor herself performs the fictional Eva with mesmerising intensity – you can’t take your eyes off her and you can never guess what’s going to happen next. At one moment she’s voicing her soft-spoken, well-meaning mother back in Ireland, forever offering to pray for her, the next she assumes the infuriating coolness of her English lover, the Cyclist.

It soon becomes clear that the Cyclist’s true love is his collection of bicycles, which hang like an art installation from the hall ceiling of his absent parents’ ‘Castle in Crouch End’, as Eva calls it. She soon discovers that his life is wholly attuned to the rhythm of training and races. What in another writer’s hands might be a conventional story of love and loss is transformed by Mustard’s sheer strangeness and imaginative energy.

And then there’s the play’s most enigmatic component: mustard. The show opens with a sort of ode to it, and Eva, after times of pain or distress, returns to the line ‘my mind goes to mustard’. What can it mean? Is it something about sharpness, self-harm? The fact that O’Connor resists spelling out a precise meaning becomes all the more powerfully intriguing when Eva starts to engage with the seemingly random objects on the stage – a bucket, a foot pump and a deflated paddling pool. Suddenly she is angrily emptying jars of mustard into the pool. Under Hildegard Ryan’s sure-footed direction, O’Connor plays Eva as completely unselfconscious, first stripping down to her underwear, then crouching in the pool, slathering mustard all over her face and body, then glaring defiantly, like a sort of yellow Caliban.

This is the point of crisis. Then Eva, while talking of her cycle of recovery and relapse, determinedly and again without comment, performs another bizarre ritual, taking cloths off her makeshift washing line and slowly cleansing herself off. Is redemption possible? Mustard has a strangely satisfying ending.

Runs until 4 June 2023