Stick to the gags, Sharon
This production, funny in spots, suffers badly from clunky attempts at ‘realism’
Katie Holly is obviously talented; she had some success with her first play, Marion, and this short one has a good basic idea, but she has let her main objective get drowned with complications of character, casting and staging. And it’s a pity she doesn’t manage to round things off more snappily when the play has obviously run its course.
It has the problem of being a schizophrenic mix of music hall comedy and emotional realism with touches of farce that are not always well integrated. The dialogue has good moments when it’s light-hearted, but it’s uneven and less convincing when it gets serious; and introducing a baby named Anus – I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a disruption of Aonghus – is not one of the comic highlights.
The title character, Sharon, after some time working away from home, and an emotional break-up, is returning to Cork to face her mother’s expectations – marriage, stability, children.
Except none of that is on Sharon’s to-do list. Apart from the excellent Irene Kelleher as Sharon, there are seven or eight other characters, played by Mark Griffin and Marie O’Donovan.
It wasn’t a good idea to have those two performers taking on multiple roles that included Griffin cross-sexing for the part of a mother and O’Donovan playing one role as a man. With no costume changes and uncertain accents, it was sometimes unclear who exactly was speaking.
Mark Griffin as Nigel is the love-interest Sharon admires yet doesn’t really want: he distinguishes his role as the mother by using a broad Cork accent, occasionally delivered at incomprehensible Formula One speed. Marie O’Donovan as well as playing female characters, triples up as a local man, played in amateur village hall style.
As a device, the cross-gender stuff was clumsy and drew too much attention to itself. Irene Kelleher is such a good performer that she could carry a lot more of the narration and characterisation.
The audience certainly enjoyed the comic bits and it works quite well as a humorous piece but when it goes all serious and introduces grief and loss you can almost hear the crunching gear change.
Some cringe-making funeral dialogue was unconvincingly aimed at persuading us that we were watching real-life drama, despite the general wacky tone of the production.
‘As a device, the cross-gender stuff was clumsy and drew attention to itself’