Ireland on the therapy couch with Eleanor Tiernan

Eleanor Tiernan’s Dublin Fringe show satirises our woes by treating comedy as a counselling session, says Richard Fitzpatrick

IRELAND has had a fair old battering over the last 1,000 years. Comedian Eleanor Tiernan has catalogued a litany of those woes for her new comedy show, the ‘National Therapy Project’. These woes include “the stealing of Trevelyan’s corn, the repression of our glorious and righteous human sexual desires by the Catholic Church, the alarming spread of foot and mouth disease, Sonia O’Sullivan getting diarrhea in the tunnel, Louis Walsh and his mediocrity factory, when the children of Lir turned into swans for 900 years, the sale of our oil and gas to Shell for a handful of magic beans, when Miley took Fidelma for a roll in the hay, the space around Ryan Tubridy that he doesn’t take up…”

To ease the pain, Tiernan’s self-styled National Identity Management Agency will put on the ‘National Therapy Project’, at the Tiger Dublin Fringe. The show grew out of a skit Tiernan did on St Patrick’s Day earlier this year, at RTÉ’s online Mansion House gig, ‘We Need to Talk About Ireland’.

Tiernan conducted a therapy ritual: she got the audience to imagine that there was a seven-year-old Ireland in the room, like a little child. She then read out, in a ritualistic chant, the nation’s traumas, and got the audience to respond to each painful memory with the assurance: ‘It’s not your fault.’

Tiernan is coy about elaborating on the hour-long show. It will be therapy on a group basis. She says: “Attendance is compulsory on a voluntary basis. It isn’t stand-up comedy, as such. It’s an experience they will have. It will be like going for the NCT, but for the mind rather than your car.”

Like all Tiernan shows, the laughs will be serious. She has a line in wordplay and unreadable facial expressions. Famously, last year, she threw Dáithí Ó Sé and Maura Derrane during an appearance on RTÉ’s Today show, when the panel was discussing the horse-meat saga.

The presenters couldn’t tell that Tiernan’s comments about the apparent sexual tension between young Dublin butchers and elderly women chatting about sausages were gibberish.

The YouTube clip (shorthand ‘Eleanor Tiernan sausages’) went viral. The sight of Ó Sé’s eyes rolling around and around in his head, as he tried to put some sense on Tiernan’s comments, is comedy gold.

“When I do stand-up, I try to leave as much work for the audience to do as I can, because when I’m in an audience I don’t like the performer to spell it out for me,” Tiernan says about her comedy style. “It’s like Hansel and Gretel — you’re leaving breadcrumbs for people to follow. It’s ultimately more rewarding in that way. It’s almost like a practical joke on the audience. They’re challenged to accept it as comedy, rather than be told it’s comedy and to laugh.

“I told that joke on the Today show, quite deadpan. The presenters didn’t get that it was a joke. They just moved on, and were very confused by it. This girl came up to me after a show, one time, and she was quite angry. She was standing up for Dáithí and Maura. She took issue with me. She said: ‘If you don’t tell me what’s funny, then how am I supposed to know when to laugh?’ I didn’t really have an answer for her argument. When she sees me, she doesn’t see comedy. She just sees confusion. It’s not a comedy club she’s at when she’s watching me perform. It’s a confusion club.”

- Eleanor Tiernan’s ‘National Therapy Project’ runs September 16-20 at Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin. [url=www.fringefest.com/url]