A first in gender studies

0 Tessa Coates puts her degree to work in this new show

her mother’s theories about everything seldom a reassurance. Breezy and animated, as befits a sometime sketch performer, she’s adroit at act-outs

illustrating her insecurities. Yet while there are some compelling anecdotes about Coates’ audition for Saturday Night Takeaway and her inappropriate poetry recital as a six-year-old, along with some genuinely fascinating stuff about our deep, so-called lizard brain, the show really kicks into gear when she starts to examine gender.

Beginning with the familiar but no doubt highly influential sexism of Disney films, she relates a depressingly regressive encounter with 21st-century laddism that caused her to snap, the communication breakdown reflective of a more widespread social malaise.

Recalling a time when she too might have been more progressive in bolstering someone’s self-identity, Coates then powerfully dismisses the victimhood claimed by alleged celebrity sex pests, arguing for the failure of language in conveying women’s historical oppression.

With droll wit, Witch Hunt benefits greatly from Coates’ easy marriage of light and shade, making her points in an accessible and entertaining way.

JAY RICHARDSON

Until 26 August. Today 3:30pm.

This investigation into how memory works by Dublin-based Malaprop Theatre begins with a challenge: in five hours time, will you remember what happened in this show, beginning to end? Memory, of course, doesn’t work like that, as the show goes on to demonstrate through a series of multilayered scenarios.

Even in everyday situations – lovers remembering moments together, friends trying to recall that annoying bloke at a dinner party – the brain throws up different versions. That becomes much more loaded if a crime has taken place, and your job is to prosecute or exonerate depending on what a person remembers. And then there’s history. What do we know about Rasputin, for example, and where from? Exam revision at school? Boney M lyrics? Is this how our sense of the world is formed?

Each scenario is elegantly presented and poses complex questions, and the finale (no spoilers) is simply extraordinary, but there is a sense that the drama is being employed in service of ideas, with plot and characters secondary. Did I remember all this five hours later? I cheated, I had notes. A story, though, a character we really care about – those stick in the mind.

SUSAN MANSFIELD

Until 26 August. Today 5:50pm.