You can imagine another writer telling this story with a gothic flourish or pity-me pleading. But the attraction of Karen Cogan’s monologue is its matter-of-fact acceptance of life’s dramas. It touches on death, heartbreak, mental illness, hard-drinking abandon, obsession and loss, yet relates it all with such understatement and knowing humour that the extremes seem like undulations, not without emotional impact but proportionate and subtle. It’s the opposite of an in-yer-face drama, even though it shares many themes and a 1990s time frame.
Staged by London’s Soho theatre and Dublin’s Fishamble, it’s the story of Brenda, a pleasure-seeking thirtysomething, standing out from the crowd in a conservative Cork where everyone knows everyone, and no indiscretion goes unnoticed. With a shrug of acceptance, she deals with low-level homophobia (variously bewildered, ignorant and aggressive) as she hangs out in the city’s hotspots with her best friend Veronica and sometime girlfriend Olivia, looking for love where she finds rejection, escaping into drunkenness when the pressure gets too great.
Performing her own script under Oonagh Murphy’s steady direction, Cogan is a compelling storyteller, her voice mellifluous and even, her manner warm and witty. Told with a different slant, this could have been the tale of a malevolent stalker; instead, she makes it an empathetic story of a directionless woman whose denial about a breakup leads to behaviour that seems less psychopathic than sad and fruitless. She is no more in control of her feelings of emptiness than she is of the fate of her sick best friend. It is a play of modest ambition, for all its hidden pleasures, but no less vivid for it.
- At Assembly George Square theatre, Edinburgh, until 26 August. Then at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 19–22 September, and Soho theatre, London, 24 September–20 October.
- Read all our Edinburgh festival reviews.
