Kate Regan is a woman defined by the men in her life. There’s her gentle old Belfast dad, disappointed by the company she keeps, there’s Big Joe, the teenage crush she lost in a daredevil accident, and there’s her attentive but unexciting husband, Brendy.
Above all, there’s Diver, a charismatic lowlife more than 20 years her senior whose lust for life matches his appetite for destruction. A relationship that began as grooming came to an end when he found another “child bride”. She is happily free of him but haunted by his memory when he unexpectedly comes back into her life.
If that makes Kate sound like a walking affront to the Bechdel test, there’s no sense of that in Amy Molloy’s excellent performance. Centred and robust, with a dry Northern Irish eloquence, she is a woman absolutely at the centre of her own story.
In Katherine Nesbitt’s precise and unshowy production, staged on a raised boardwalk above an inky black floor, Molloy tells her tale without rancour or regret, just a steely acceptance of the choices she has made.
And as her monologue takes shape, so it emerges as a metaphor for Northern Ireland’s transition from the violence associated with men to the nurturing associated with women.
Playwright Michael John O’Neill doesn’t overstate the case; for the most part, he makes the Good Friday agreement seem like an incidental detail rather than a motivating force. But as Kate reckons with a past she feels has left her broken, she slowly realises a future is possible. In this way, This Is Paradise charts the movement from division and violence to the chance of “carving something good”.
At Traverse theatre, Edinburgh, until 29 August. Then available online until 29 September.
