The Talk of the Town Project Theatre, Dublin
The first is her unexpected ability to out-New York New Yorkers: she drank with the best of them, she quipped with the best of them, her sardonic columns were a perfect fit for the New Yorker. The second compelling part of her story is how, having won such independence of mind and circumstance, mental illness robbed her of both, and she descended into a bewildered, unkempt figure, ending up homeless, dying penniless and forgotten.
Emma Donoghue ostensibly sticks to Brennan’s first decade or so in New York. We meet Brennan (an uncanny Catherine Walker) fully formed: exchanging barbs over martinis with her colleagues at the Algonquin. Her early years are represented upstage by composite scenes from her fiction. The trouble is that these scenes invite the audience to conclude Brennan’s past was a kitchen-sink cliche of Irish realism. The truth is more interesting.
