Loving the alien play is a laugh-out-loud keeper
This charming tale has all the hyphens: it’s real-life, feel-good and laugh-out-loud funny.
Endearing in big Jarvis Cocker style-glasses, Irish storyteller Sonya Kelly presents the romantic comedy, How to Keep an Alien, about having to prove her love — not to her girlfriend, but to a prosaic government administration, to earn a partner visa.
Kelly, supported by amenable stage manager Paul Curley, has the proverbial gift of the gab and an ability with simile: lovers’ eyes lock together “like the perfect game of tetris”; bureaucrats probably “iron their own underpants”; love is “its own special form of OCD”.
She says her beloved’s Australian accent is like a “chocolate soup trapeze”. (One might suspect that love is deaf as well as blind, except that Kelly’s own Aussie accent is spot-on.)
No reflections specifically relate to the same-sex nature of Kelly’s relationship; instead the theme is documentation. What happens to an entanglement when its every knot must be tagged, filed and put into a folder?
Still, as the play acknowledges, the heartache of falling in love with an alien on a working holiday is a firstworld problem. Other people in the immigration queue — asylum seekers, for example — are far worse off. Sunday
The beautifully-told story of an Irish ancestor immigrating to Australia in the 1860s adds a poignant counterpoint.
There are no costumes as such and the set mostly looks thrown together with what they found backstage but that’s fine. Carl Kennedy’s sound design does a lot of the atmospheric heavy-lifting.
It drags ever so slightly near the end but this is nit-picking. How to Keep an Alien is a keeper. Lovely.