Gina Moxley’s wonderfully quirky play for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre was inspired by Three Approaches to Psychotherapy, recordings made in 1964 of Gloria (a 30-year-old Californian divorcée) of her sessions with three psychotherapists — in which she discussed her sex life as a newly single woman.
They were meant to be solely for students, but the filmmakers showed them in cinemas (as The Gloria Films) without her permission; Moxley uses this betrayal to fashion a funny, feminist analysis of how female sexuality has been always recorded through the male gaze.
Liv O’Donoghue is a serene and self-contained Gloria in the recreated sessions. Moxley plays the male therapists — paternal, egotistical and predatory by turns — and she fashions a new dick for each to give her the “sense of authority and entitlement that comes with this lump of meat”.
Between each session Moxley talks to the audience about the shame an Irish upbringing gave women of her generation, and the repeated small acts of harassment that women and girls have to endure — “A lifetime of dicks I never asked to see.”
She also rocks out with Jane Deasy, who plays grungy guitar and acts as a caustic one-woman chorus at a microphone at the side of the stage in John McIlduff’s inventive production.
Until Aug 25 (tickets.edfringe.com)
