On her best Beahaviour
IT truly is a glorious time for female-led and created comedy at the moment, with the likes of Fleabag, GameFace, Pure, Back To Life, Lazy Susan, and Derry Girls.
And joining that list is this new creation from Irish stand-up and actor Aisling Bea, which manages to be both properly funny, realistically human and surprisingly moving all within half an hour.
Aisling stars as Aine who, when we first meet her, is checking out of a rehab facility, where she’d been staying following a ‘teeny weeny nervous breakdown’.
Aine is being collected by her sister Shona (Catastrophe creator and all-round comedy goddess Sharon Horgan), who is, in equal parts, annoyed with the situation, guilty at not realising how much her baby sister was struggling, and terrified that she might not be ‘fixed’.
Back in the real world, as we catch up with her four months
later, it’s not addiction Aine is having trouble dealing with, but loneliness.
Not really sure what she wants or where she belongs, she takes a job teaching English as a foreign language to adult learners, and keeps herself busy putting a brave face on for Shona that everything is right in the world. Which it clearly isn’t, as she invites a fellow former inmate round and makes an unexpected and clumsy move on him.
Depression, anxiety, social awkwardness and chronic loneliness might not seem like natural material for comedy, but put all that in the expert hands of performers like Aisling and Sharon, and it genuinely works.