Aisling Bea’s Older Than Jesus review: Siobhán McSweeney surprise delights Cork crowd
Aisling Bea performed at Cork Opera House on Friday night. Picture: Damien Eagers Photography
★★★★☆
As Siobhán McSweeney floats onto the stage, a paragon of Rebel County pride in a retro Cork jersey, singing The Banks, and toting a cardboard Roy Keane mask, you might be forgiven for wondering if you’re in some kind of Corkonian fever dream, or perhaps an astoundingly niche Midsummer Festival production.
No, it’s merely the pre-show introduction from comic Aisling Bea as she brings her stand-up tour to Cork on a Friday night. It’s a smart move from the Kildare woman — a very Cork way to break the ice and instantly endear herself to the local audience.
That’s right, the show hasn’t even started, and the excited screams from the auditorium threaten to lift the roof off the building. Blanketed in a bathrobe with a shower cap on her hair, Bea’s early chat with the crowd is off to a flying start, no surprise given the demand from her Cork fans months ago for a date in the real capital to be added to her tour.
“I actually wasn't supposed to do this show, to be honest. This is my day off,” she explains. “I was bullied online; it was the most online reaction I have ever gotten when I posted my tour show dates with an absence of Cork.”
She jokes that “a very certain demographic of Cork woman” insisted she include a date in the city and she fearfully complied.
“I literally was so afraid of getting bullied anymore that I added the Opera House to please you. So here I am, Cork. What more do you want from me, Siobhán McSweeney holding a Clonakilty black pudding, in a Cork jersey, singing The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee, in a Roy Keane mask? Is that what you want?”
Cue McSweeney, almost exactly as described (it’s later clarified via a shout from McSweeney that it was black pudding from McCarthy’s of Kanturk), and the cheers build to a crescendo as the star of and sweeps into view. She lingers but a moment before vanishing back to her seat in the auditorium.
How do you follow that kind of entrance? Well, for Bea, she makes it look easy. She chats for a few minutes, sharing a few anecdotes and quizzing some of those in the front row before introducing her warm-up act, her co-star Martin Angolo, who has the crowd laughing before Bea returns in a more put-together look for the official start of her set.
It is the second-last stop on the tour and during the show Bea shares some insight into her past experiences with religion — “I was actually an altar boy,” she tells us, before diving into how she was demoted to wash-up duties for “giving it too much on the bells” — as well as tackling the taboo topic of ageing, and moving on to how she got “accidentally pregnant by a musician”, all with her trademark wit.
For such an icon of Irish comedy both at home and in the UK, it’s hard to believe this is Bea’s first-ever stand-up tour. She is comfortable, capably shifting between light and heavy topics with a charming quip and a flair for mischief. She switches discussions from geriatric pregnancy to genealogy, from her father’s death to her ADHD diagnosis, all with playful banter with the audience to keep energy high.
She ends on a compelling discussion about motherhood, describing the overwhelming amount of congratulations she received when news of her pregnancy spread, more well-wishes than she’d received for anything in her successful comedy career.
“Do I love the baby? Oh, my God, I love the baby,” she says. “But does she complete me? No, she doesn't complete me, because I was complete before her.”
After supportive cheers from the crowd, she gains more than a few whoops after revealing she named her dagger Saoirse, not least because the Irish name “absolutely shits up the Brits”.
No doubt Bea will be back with another tour, given the enthusiastic response from the crowd. Perhaps next time she’s in Cork, it will come full circle and open with Keano dressed as Sister Michael?
- Aisling Bea’s tour wraps up in Vicar Street, Dublin on Sunday, May 3.
