Stitch review: Irene Kelleher shines in dark tale set on Cork's Shandon Street 

Irene Kelleher gives a remarkable performance in this story of Samhain horror 

Irene Kelleher in Stitch, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. Picture: Marcin Lewandowski 

Stitch, J Nolan’s Stationery Shop, Shandon St, Cork Midsummer Festival ★★★★☆

Watching a play set at the spookiest time of the year, performed in a dark and gloomy old shop, on the day of the summer solstice, when the sun is splitting the stones outside creates a somewhat jarring disconnect. 

However, it is an unsettling feeling that is perfectly in tune with the themes of Stitch, a one-woman play performed by Irene Kelleher as part of Cork Midsummer Festival. The play makes good use of its site-specific location — a former shop on Shandon Street, here brilliantly transformed by set designer Jenny Whyte into Pins and Needles, a dilapidated seamstress’s premises in a small Irish town. 

It is Halloween night, 1989, and the shop is about to be turned into an Xtravision but one tenant remains, a girl called Alice. This is no wonderland, however, and soon we discover the sad and horrifying story of Alice’s past and the scars she bears, both visible and invisible. 

Stitch was performed at a former stationery shop on Shandon Street, Cork.

As well as the reminders of real-life tragedies and the repression and pious hypocrisy of Irish society, there are disturbing echoes of the folk horror of The Wicker Man as Alice talks of the crowning of the Samhain Festival Queen, and The Butcher Boy, when she dances around wearing a pig mask.

 It is truly heartrending to witness Alice, with her hair in girlish plaits, cuddling her beloved cat and crying for her mammy. When she fantasises about how all of the locals who colluded in her nightmarish existence will burn on the Samhain pyre, you feel like picking up a torch and joining her.

Irene Kelleher in Stitch. Picture: Marcin Lewandowski

 Kelleher is also on writing duties for Stitch, and the ingenious use of rhyme effectively conveys the horrific adult experiences Alice has been exposed to as a child. Her performance too bursts with imagination — she conjures up entire characters from the rags and remnants that surround her — although the splenetic rage can sometimes tip over into melodrama. 

Overall, it is a feat of extraordinary commitment, made even more impressive by the fact that Kelleher performed Stitch in tandem with another one-woman show in the festival, Footnote. 

Her vision is realised with skill and verve by director Regina Crowley, while production, overseen by Michael Anthony Greene, is outstanding, with sound and lighting design by Cormac O’Connor and costumes and masks by Valentina Gambardella adding greatly to the overall atmosphere.