LOTS TO UNPACK IN THIS TROLLEY JOLLY
Tesco checkout girl meets stressed nurse but will it be love on aisle three?
SHOW OF THE WEEK Next Please... Bewley’s Cafe Theatre Until Saturday ★★★★★
Joe, a checkout girl in Tesco, is waiting in the park for Melissa, a nurse struggling with the stress caused by Covid. The relationship began unofficially when Mel accidentally tipped a trolley-load of goods over Joe one day at work. Is their park meeting just a gettogether or a date? They’re both a bit dubious. How can you be sure you haven’t made a serious miscalculation?
The show, written by Aisling O’Mara, is a chirpy sex caper played for fun while tipping its cap to the problems involved in same-sex socialising. There is lots of uncensored jokey dialogue and lots of sexual references.
It begins with a couple of monologues, first from Joe who gives her family background – unpleasant parents who are mostly missing, and a loving gran who isn’t really surprised that Joe’s more interested in girls than boys.
Mel was almost married but then was dumped. Shame and embarrassment, followed by large doses of porn, the horrors of selfhelp books, dating apps, sorting out the fantasy from reality, the legitimate from the chancers and getting to grips with the niceties of online dating protocol and the ease of being misinterpreted by careless text language.
After the monologue introductions, the pair get together, fencing verbally with each other over dress, height, language, attitude to men and coffee preferences. Every sentence is likely to have verbal hand grenades, at risk of being misunderstood. No wonder Mel, while determined to be agreeable, is slightly on edge.
Then there’s Joe’s advice to Mel that she not let herself be labelled in terms of sexuality: labelling, she insists, is for canned goods in supermarkets. (Whatever happened to Pride and parading?)
Their dialogue and behaviour are a bit hectic for what is meant to be a tentative dating experience, but the show has to be taken for what it is – an amusing piece of lunchtime frivolity dipping its toe in the waters of a tricky subject.
The audience lapped it up, although I couldn’t help feeling a lot of checkout girls might consider themselves badly represented by Joe’s rough-cut personality.
‘Checkout girls might think themselves badly represented’
Aisling O’Mara and Hazel Clifford are an engaging double act, and Iseult Golden’s snappy direction leaves no time for any longeurs to slow down the pace.
■ Dublin Fringe Festival starts this week, running from Saturday until Sept 25. Among the opening shows are Absent The Wrong on the Abbey’s Peacock stage, with a large cast, looking at the lives of adoptees searching for the truth about themselves and the difficulties encountered along the way. It’s not just another documentary, but an attempt to portray the mental and physical history that never appears in official reports. Written by Dylan Coburn Gray and directed by Veronica Coburn.
■ A production out of the normal run of things is Ray Young’s Thirst Trap, a 30-minute sound piece for audiences in their bath. It delves into the possible outcome of rising temperatures, and the correlation between social and climate justice, while investigating water as a key character in our collective conversations. Runs from Saturday until Sept 25. All Day. €12.
■ Wake (National Stadium, Thursday until Sept 17) seems to be aimed at anyone who wants a noisy celebration of community and regeneration delivered ‘in a frenzy of ritual, rave, grief and joy’.
■ Accents, at the Project Arts Centre (Saturday until Sept 17) with Emmet Kirwan, Claire O’Reilly and music by Eoin French, is a musical journey through the city, the voices of families and the people who surround us. See fringefest.com