You’re Needy (Sounds Frustrating): A wellness culture nightmare
The audience of one arrives as a volunteer to assist a woman with agoraphobia.
Pembroke Cottages, Dublin Fringe Festival
★★★★☆
There is a dark secret behind the seemingly perfect suburbia of Tasteinyourmouth’s immersive play. Inside a pristine cottage in Donnybrook, past the neatly arranged front room of a family home, lies a whole other world: a small washroom thickly humid with hot water and glycol-sweet fragrance oils, where blue light emanates from a bathtub swirling with algae and dissolved salt. Sludge and murk have managed to collect here, like a kind of swamp.
Inside the bathtub lies the strangest sight you might see on the Fringe. A young woman Karen – a gently intimate performance by Laoise Murray – is bandaged like a mummy, wrapped in seaweed and translucent cling film, with cucumber slices bound to her eyes like two pale emeralds. She rotates and extends as if doing slow-motion water aerobics, repeating mantras to herself: “When I wake in the morning, I will find self-love.”