In Corn Exchange Theatre Company’s adaptation of Eimear McBride’s award-winning novel, there is nowhere to hide. On a bare black stage, relieved only by slivers of white light, the solo performer, Aoife Duffin, stands in pyjama bottoms and T-shirt, in an unspecified time or place. Barely moving at first, she begins the narration of the life of an unnamed Girl, from the age of two to 20.
Written by McBride as an intense interior monologue, the narrative transposes effortlessly to the stage, as if this is where it belongs. Director Annie Ryan, who adapted it, has found dramatic pace in the staccato rhythms of the text. Duffin breathes life into the reported speech and voices of the other characters: the Girl’s controlling mother, tyrannical grandfather and terminally ill brother.
The clarity of performance moves us beyond preoccupation with McBride’s fractured syntax, so that the core of this piece emerges. Its exploration of the impact of sexual abuse on an unloved teenage girl lifts it from its Irish setting, and from Catholicism, showing that when a man in his 40s has sex with a 13-year-old girl, she will feel that she is to blame. In the impossible contradiction of being simultaneously an object of desire and of contempt, the young woman becomes a split person.
As others might turn to alcohol or drugs, the Girl tries to blank out her feelings through degrading sex, in a series of extreme encounters. She refuses to be passive, and in her dissociation she tries to turn her own body into an instrument of power, only to discover that liberation and abnegation are not the same thing.
This production links McBride to other unflinching explorers of female sexuality in performance from Marina Abramović to Sarah Kane. Startling and upsetting to witness, it is also courageously feminist, and through Duffin’s magnificent portrayal it travels through raw revelation of pain to a calm aftermath. In a closing image of immersion in water, a possible baptism, the Girl’s transition begins: from being a half-formed thing to becoming herself, in all her vulnerable vitality.
• Until 5 October. Box office: 00353 1 6778899. Venue: Samuel Beckett theatre, Dublin.
