When Edna O’Brien published The Country Girls in 1960 she was denounced as having “wrought a smear on Irish womanhood”; the novel was banned in Ireland, and burned in her local church. Nearly 60 years on, the book looks like a beacon. It told the truth about girls growing up in Ireland in the 50s. Their escape from the nuns, who take away a daughter’s picture of her dead mother. The bullying by older men – and the girls’ manipulation of those bullies. The joy of going on the gallivant. It has a unique fusion of lusciousness and sharp sight.
Lisa Blair’s production of The Country Girls captures the sexual vivacity, using the author’s own adaptation, which neatly fillets her novel. Violin-led music by Isobel Waller-Bridge winds through the action, intimate, mournful: Irish notes the heroines will carry with them across the water. On Richard Kent’s design – an emerald green floor with dark stone buildings – small episodes yield up the heart of the plot. A convent is summoned in a golden grid on the floor: light shining through bars. Love is conjured in a flurry of snow. A jilted teenager drips in a downpour: the essence of disappointment.
The male characters are sketchy: from the drunk, violent father to the inert suitor called Mr Gentleman. It is the girls who matter. Genevieve Hulme-Beaman gives a first-rate comic performance as the knowing friend. Dimpling, hip-swaying – and rubbing vet’s embrocation into her chum to make her bosom bigger – she is tricky as well as naughty. Grace Molony makes a beautiful professional debut a month before she was due to graduate from drama school. Moving from gawky to elegant, from ankle socks to wobbly high heels, she is moonily intelligent and shadowed by a sense of loss – of people and of possibility.
• The Country Girls is at the Minerva, Chichester until 8 July
