Pea Dinneen: Raising Her Voice
Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2
★★★★★
Can musical entertainment articulate the wearying limbo of trans people stranded on years-long waiting lists for healthcare? That’s the proposition of Pea Dinneen’s eloquent cabaret play, tracing her real-life story through stirring interpretations of pop songs from her turn-of-the-millennium youth.
During a crackling opening performance of No Doubt’s pop-punk taunt I’m Just a Girl, Dinneen takes a moment to awe at a history of Irish women using their voice to bring change, adding a note of yearning: “I’m just here outside of it all, unable to pass on these messages.”
It also sounds tinged with self-doubt, like a trans person making uncertain entry into the world of Irish womanhood, as Dinneen and the musical arranger Paul James Prior strip the band’s sound to a solitary piano: “Oh, I’m just a girl, my apologies / What I’ve become is so burdensome!”
Dinneen and Prior, who are aided by director John King, judge the tone perfectly as the production roves through her early years out as trans, to female-presenting in public for the first time, and living out waiting periods prescribed by doctors to think over gender-affirming healthcare.
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The song choices are extraordinarily sophisticated. Most unlikely is a superb sequence set to Geri Halliwell’s brassy ham Look at Me, where an online hook-up leads to a distinction between being gazed at as a fantasy and being seen and acknowledged for who you are: “Maybe next time, use your eyes / And look at me!”
Dinneen’s play – much like her performance, which is more blankly deadpan than smiling vamp – conceals revelations where you don’t expect. (See the long arc of her relationship with alcohol.) But by the end she’s aglow, her face irresistible to a smile. After waiting so long for her story to begin, she has now started it herself.
Continues at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Sunday, September 14th
