Womanly Whims

This second instalment in a series of monologues written and performed by women fits snugly into its offbeat space. Before the inanimate gazes of James Joyce and Liam O'Flaherty, Billie Traynor and Judith Ryan of Tall Tales Theatre Company contribute their stories to the (male-dominated) Irish literary tradition.

"I'm in actual pain," begins Traynor in her piece, Redser, light-heartedly announcing the downhearted story of a single bookkeeper.

Under Maureen Collender's direction, Traynor makes the audience play both parts. The lonely account of a woman unlucky, and maladjusted, in love, Redser is told with a mixture of sass, modesty and occasional flights of girlishness. Traynor's yarn sketches misunderstandings with married husbands, odd-looking bachelors and stubborn text messages. She engages her audience with conspiratorial eye contact and a twist in the tale.

Less successful in this writer's arena, ironically, is the tale of an irritated author. Judith Ryan's The Going Away Present is ostensibly a one-sided conversation between an eccentric writer and her ceiling. Concerning the mysterious ways of the man upstairs (in more ways than one), the monologue pays less attention to the place of the audience.

The spectator uneasily switches to reader when Ryan plunges into her typewriter and recites the fantasy narrative of her book. Collender also finds the transformation difficult, settling for a type of mimetic t'ai chi to portray the concentration of the artist at work, together with the unfurling events in her fiction. At first, the interruptions from above neatly bookend the developing text, but the piece picks up considerably when the distractions intrude on the narrative, making it so amusingly fractured that even James Joyce would have approved.

Runs until September 9th; bookings at 01-4100801