The best theatre shows this week: First Fortnight festival

Lunatic, There I Go

Civic Theatre, Tallaght. Ends Jan 6 8.15pm €15/€12 firstfortnight.ie

In 1944, a 19-year-old woman named Hanna Greally was admitted to St Loman's psychiatric hospital in Mullingar for what was euphemistically understood to be "a rest". In her early adulthood, she had experienced a nervous breakdown, and following the death of her father her mother decided that Hanna should be sent to "the big house". Instead of a brief convalescence, Greally spent almost 20 years there, long after all signs of recovery, because after her mother died, no relatives applied for her release. How Greally survived such a confinement, not alone in the history of Irish psychiatry as an "unclaimed patient", became the subject of her memoir Bird's Nest Soup which made her a cause célèbre in the 1970s. Now writer Gill McCaw has adapted her story for a solo stage work, performed by Andrea Scott, combining images, music, text and movement to depict Hanna's inner world, a source of succour during her journey through abandonment and survival.

The Egg is a Lonely Hunter

Samuel Beckett's famous novel nobody heard of

---

Review: The Sound of Music is a refreshing reminder of its theatrical origins

---

Theatre highlights of the week

---

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin. Jan 8-13 8pm €15/€12 firstfortnight.ie

A young shop worker called Sophie has an irrational fear of eggs. To make matters worse, her nipples are behaving strangely, and a black hole has appeared in her neighbourhood (which she suspects is probably a pervert) and perhaps worst of all, one of her favourite socks has gone missing. So begins the predicament of this surreal tale from up-and-coming comedian Hannah Mamalis, debuted last autumn at the Dublin Fringe Festival; a one-woman show that imagines an absurd town and meditates on the odd and obscure phenomena in our lives. Sophie’s ruminations are guided by precocious eight-year-olds, prophetic animals and accidental discoveries, blurring her dreams with reality, and the production’s participation in the First Fortnight festival suggests this is not always a comforting confusion. Directed by the trail-blazing Jeda de Brí, it becomes a free-associating mystery story about finding a path through neurosis.

The Friday Night Effect

Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin. Jan 9-13 7.30pm €15/€12 (Sat 2.30pm) firstfortnight.ie

Debuted last year in Edinburgh and a success at the Fringe, Eva O’Connor and Hildegard Ryan’s play for their company, Sunday’s Child, is a choose-your-own adventure performance of audience interaction, guiding three Dublin flatmates through a fateful night in the city. That one of them, Collette (played by O’Connor), will not survive the night is no spoiler; instead the journey is the story and our choices come with consequences. Collette has a bipolar disorder, which the performance treats with both sensitivity and irreverence, and the show too is designed to move along unpredictable energies, between a night of various intoxicants, angry eruptions and relationship breakdowns through episodic scenes of action, debate and recollection. Revived for the First Fortnight festival, the show asks for a radical act of empathy: to put yourself in their place and say, honestly, what you would do.