Irene Kelleher’s performance in Gone Full Havisham begins at its preset. As I enter the cosy theatre above Bewley’s cafe, the first thing I see is the array of post-its lining the walls, the set and the cabaret tables. These post-it notes expand into the audience, with messages like “POINT OF PENCIL” and “Broken BITS”. The second thing I notice is the gasping body of a young woman lying across a bed. Even before the performance begins, the commitment that Kelleher brings to the role is clear.
This commitment continues throughout the play, which is at times quite grotesque. Make-up is smeared across Kelleher’s face, she brushes her teeth until saliva covers her face, she rubs banana into her armpit like a deodorant. This is jarring, but the drama is at its best when it is gritty and hyper-real. I care most about the protagonist when Kelleher is allowed to show her full commitment to her role as the madwoman, and the audience is able to believe her.
The play falls down in between these moments. While the emotion is convincing, the writing rarely is. The play tells the story of Emily Halloran, a modern Dickensian character who has gone mad due to some combination of social media, childhood trauma and the perils of being a woman. The story begins on Emily’s fifth month of livestreaming her mental breakdown from a hotel room. A viral sensation, she will wear, eat and say whatever her audience wants to make them happy. While the final straw before her breakdown is never explicitly revealed, her abusive ex-fiancé insists on shoving a camera in her face whenever she goes, exploiting her for online social capital. The one clear message I understood from this play was that social media, in every circumstance, is bad, and we should all be very afraid of it.
This striking lack of nuance continues as the play progresses. After a close relationship with her father, Emily falls into a toxic relationship with a man who she explicitly says reminds her of him. The reliance on the madwoman trope of “daddy issues” makes it difficult to empathise with Emily. As well as this, its historically misogynistic connotations left me feeling uncomfortable. This is not to say that no woman has ever sought out a relationship because it reminds her of her parents. However, this trope was included in the performance in a formulaic manner that lacked nuance.
This is one of many stories we hear from Emily. While they’re generally told engagingly, the strong performance is a hard-fought battle against a chronically weak script. The formula – woman does something shocking for livestream, shocking thing evokes unpleasant memory, memory is recounted to livestream – repeats seemingly ad infinitum until the piece ends. It seems to be attempting to justify Emily’s madness to its audience, gathering pieces of evidence as replacement for any real empathy towards the character.
It’s easy to tell what Kelleher was going for when they wrote this play. Not for the first time in theatre history, an attempt is made to delve into a psyche and discover what makes the mad person mad. However, when no novel or important story is being told, it just feels like gawking at the mad lady. At its best, Gone Full Havisham is an uncanny look at what disintegrates when someone stays in the same hotel room for five months. But at its worst, this play is something more sinister: a group of people paying to be shocked by the concept of mental illness. Gone Full Havisham runs at Bewleys cafe theatre until February 1st. Tickets start from €8, and can be purchased at the Bewleys Cafe Theatre website.
