Theatre review: Up close and personal with Theatre for One at Cork Midsummer Festival

Theatre for One is an exhilarating half-hour experience

Theatre for One continues at Emmet Place until Jun 23. Picture: Clare Keogh

★★★★★

Theatre for One was a big hit with audiences when it premiered at Cork Midsummer Festival in 2019, and it makes a welcome return this year with 12 specially commissioned five-minute pieces performed in a confessional-style booth outside Cork Opera House. The same six writers feature in this staging by Landmark Productions and Octopus Theatricals — Marina Carr, Stacey Gregg, Emmet Kirwan, Louise Lowe, Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh — but this time around they are joined by six new writers who they have mentored — Iseult Deane, Susannah Al Fraihat, Aoibhéann McCann, Joy Nesbitt, Ois O’Donoghue and Aoife Delany Reade.

The confrontational aspect of Theatre for One is potent, the literal embodiment of getting up close and personal, with any resonances given an added piquancy by the proximity of the performer. This is particularly true of the first selection of three mini-plays, which are tied together by the thread of motherhood, impending and otherwise.

Freeze by Ois O’Donoghue, mentored by Louise Lowe, features a performance of searing authenticity from Liath Hannon as a young trans woman pondering the idea of motherhood in a clinical setting that is challenging in more ways than one. Humanitarian, written and performed by Aoibhéann McCann, mentored by Stacey Gregg, is a slyly crafted tale of the compromises we make as our youthful idealism fades, with a gratifying Tales of the Unexpected-type twist. Brilliant, by Gregg, stars a manically convincing Kathy Rose O’Brien as a frazzled new mother who craves a kind word.

The second tranche of three kicks off with Cygnum Canticum, a masterclass of pathos from Marina Carr, with a stunning, heart-rending turn from Anna Healy, conjuring up the wonder of a child from the perspective of a middle-aged woman. Brevity is truly the soul of wit in Emmet Kirwan’s pin-sharp and hilarious Queen of the Pyramids; Kate Gilmore is brilliant as a fast-talking Dub whose adventures in ‘multi-level marketing’ come to a messy end. Finally, Blue Heat by Iseult Deane, mentored by Marina Carr, stars Grace Collender as a bride fated to keep what appears to be an eternal vigil at the lake where her soldier sweetheart perished.

It is a privilege to experience such breadth of acting and writing talent in the space of half an hour. What is initially a discomfiting intimacy ends up being exhilarating; in an increasingly atomised world, one is reminded of the eternal truth of EM Forster’s famous epigraph: Only Connect.

• Theatre for One continues at Emmet Place until Jun 23, see corkmidsummer.com for details.