Theatre review: Underneath at the Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire

Pat Kinevane completes his remarkable solo trilogy with this latest work. In keeping with Forgotten and Silent, which dealt with the elderly and the homeless, respectively, Kinevane here gives us another voice from the margins. His nameless heroine has spent her life in the shadows, pushed there by the cruel rejections of those who shun her because of how she looks. She carries through life a facial disfigurement caused by a bolt of lightning — not the only unlucky strike in this short, sad life Kinevane narrates.

Yet, in an effective conceit, Kinevane has her speak to us from the grave. Literally a tomb in a Cobh graveyard where she’s been stashed by her murderer. Liberated from her earthly form — she stands before us bald, and blackened from head to toe — she is bright, funny and, well, full of life. Beauty, after all, is a moot issue for those who have “passed over”. Kinevane both performs and hosts us — he engages a couple of people in the front row, individualised his delivery from time to time, as if chatting over a cup of tea.

This sense of normality jars somewhat with the design’s allusions to ancient Egypt, and its supernatural trappings of the next world, not to mention sequences that parody the property show A Place in the Sun. But Kinevane carries it off with a bravura confidence, aided by the sure hand of director Jim Culleton as he switches between harrowing experiences, funny observations and moments of triumph.

Those little victories are sometimes a little too neat and anecdotal, but are possibly a necessary balm for the audience. The power of the play lies in its picking away our worst instincts and prejudices. It makes for an uncomfortable looking-glass.

• Underneath is at the Everyman Theatre, Cork, on Thursday and Friday. Silent and Forgotten are at the same venue on Monday and Tuesday, respectively.