PURPLE SNOWFLAKES AND TITTY WANKS
Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
It's an arresting title, and Sarah Hanly grabs the audience by the balls from the start. After beginning by saying, "I'm just very, very horny," she goes on to describe sexual exploration and discovery in her convent-school oratory, punished by being made to play "the man" in Antigone (for which she fashions a sac of testicles).
This sets the play’s tone of frankness and rebellion against the suffocating roles, behaviour, language and dishonesty forced on women and girls growing up today. A coming-of-age celebrating sexuality and detailing encounters from the exhilarating to the exploitative to the experimental, it also ranges over eating disorders, family dysfunction, friendship, the dynamics of girls at school, and chaotic life as a drama student in London.
The Irish playwright and actor’s debut, a coproduction between the Abbey and London’s Royal Court, has myriad characters, all played by Hanly on Jacob Lucy’s spare, asymmetrical set, directed by Alice Fitzgerald. She roves around, pulling props from her bellybag, and characters and accents and incidents from her core, to create the world of Saoirse Murphy.
This is refreshing and disturbing, and joyous and dark, and hilarious and painful, all at the same time, with a burning anger at the core
This is relayed to her unseen friend Aisling in a series of snappy scenes and language bawdy and poetic. There are graphic and realistic descriptions, from what an orgasm is actually like to the physicality of making yourself throw up.
Saoirse presents as gutsy and unafraid but harbours secrets and vulnerabilities, and Hanly’s is an accomplished, powerful solo performance, raw and authentic but controlled. It’s also very funny, with hilarious set pieces and laugh-out-loud lines. After telling Aisling she has learned to make her own orgasms, “How in God’s name do you make that happen?” asks Aisling. “Practice and determination.”
Central to the plot – there’s a thin line between delightful chaos and disturbing chaos – is the nature of woman, and Saoirse’s desire to be a “real woman” in the face of expectations, even while playing Creon with fake balls (“taking up this much space. It’s like a drug”). Describing sexual pleasure with a woman, her mother responds, “We won’t talk like this in public spaces.” “Why not, I says. The boys do.”
While forthright and entertaining in its evisceration of gender expectations and emerging, uninformed sexuality, the play is at all times dark and disturbing. There is grief, regret and pain in the story of Saoirse, who’s just a teenager.
This is refreshing and disturbing, and joyous and dark, and hilarious and painful, all at the same time, with a burning anger at the core.
Runs at the Abbey until Saturday, October 16th as part of Dublin Theatre Festival
