Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks: A bad-girl comedy set loose on religious Ireland
Sarah Hanly’s dark comedy follows a woman from convent school to becoming an actor. Photo: Luca Truffarelli
Abbey Theatre - Peacock stage, Dublin Theatre Festival
★ ★ ★ ★
At one point in the Abbey Theatre and Royal Court Theatre’s excellent dark comedy Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks, a young actor’s pantomime production of Jack and the Beanstalk grinds to a halt because they’re too stoned to perform. Eventually, Saoirse (the play’s sharp creator Sarah Hanly) is dragged away by a police officer. “I forgot what I’ve come from and that’s the point,” she says, addled with cocaine, while also explaining the story of her life.
Throughout the play, Saoirse reminisces aloud to an absent friend Aisling, recalling private details with a relaxed vulgar candour. She begins with her first orgasm, achieved in the oratory of a convent school. In a place where teenage girls’ desires and mental illnesses are kept under wraps, Saoirse awakens to her lesbian sexuality and, in the same mordant tone, regurgitates her food under the influence of an eating disorder, all without alarm.
That makes Hanly’s script as funny as it is startling, its lead character running riot in a bad-girl comedy set in religious Ireland. Nuns and priests get caught off-guard, catching Saoirse partaking in different sexual acts. After being deserted by her father, she has one eurerka moment where she outlines how civilization has been pacifying women since the Garden of Eden, much to the blush of an astounded teacher. When given the role of Creon in a school production of Antigone, she goes off-script and challenges the audience about female invisibility in society.
Saoirse is easily an outlaw in a land that treats her with suspicion, but there’s something more strangely conspicuous when, as a young adult studying acting in London, she theatricalises her obsessions with food. In one coital scene she excitedly lists off an evening’s vegan and gluten-free menu while wriggling towards an orgasm. It’s a surreal image of female trouble, where a harmful condition is fully acknowledged but not expelled either, like some kind of feminine masochism.
By the end, such chaos - and, eventually, grief - will appear indebted to the dark comedy of Phoebe Waller-Bridge but Hanly’s deft performance exposes something more local, as the origins of a woman’s pain in a shame-filled society are poignantly uncovered.
Run ended.