Review: A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is simultaneously brilliant and awful. As a performance by a single actor, it’s breathtaking: as a piece of theatrical writing, it’s phenomenal. But the underlying story is so brutal, repetitive and without any relieving glimmers of light amidst the bleakness that it leaves the onlooker feeling like they’ve been punched repeatedly in the face for 90 minutes.

It’s no surprise that actor Aoife Duffin has won awards for this production. Hers is an astounding performance: an hour and a half of monologue mixing abstract, poetic, stream-of-consciousness thought songs with scenes sketched out with a simple change of tone and accent, characters tumbling out of her each with their own voice, like a woman possessed by a legion of demons from her past. It is an amazing feat of memory and performance that leaves one wanting to cut one’s applause short at the end not because she doesn’t deserve a standing ovation, but so that the poor woman can go and have a lie down.

Duffin’s performance is greatly aided by Annie Ryan’s dazzling script, an adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel which uses language to do things you wouldn’t think humble words could achieve: a torrent of impressions, images, emotions spilling out, the mundanities and cruelties of ordinary Irish life captured in a few strokes of the pen, all soaked in a brine of existential futility and pain. It is fantastically written. But it also leaves one wishing it hadn’t been written at all.

The defect – if it is a defect – lies in the story. The narrator, whose life is covered from birth to the age of 20, is described in the pre-show publicity as “a character of astonishing resilience and intelligence, someone determined to make sense of things amidst the deprivation of her Irish childhood”: yet she is actually the exact opposite. She is – as the title indicates – a half-formed thing, bobbing through her brutalised life, jostled passively this way and that on currents of abuse and self-loathing, defined entirely by her scars and the people that cause them.

It’s a childhood dominated by her cancer-suffering brother and loveless Irish mother more interested in the demands of the Church and what other people will think, sexually abused by an uncle at 13 and consequently coming to treat sex as a currency and a form of self-harm, unloved and ultimately abandoned even by herself. Bad things happen to her again, and again, and again. The other characters are all at best unlikeable, at worst loathsome.

There are no moments of redemption, no flashes of joy or pleasure amidst the relentless grind of low-grade misery, as uniformly grey as an Irish sky in November. It’s not an enjoyable or enriching place to spend an evening. Audiences won’t even come out with the consolation of feeling ‘there but for the grace of God’, and hug their loved ones a little tighter. They will come out shell-shocked and battered.

Jean Cocteau described his play La Voix Humaine as “a woman bleeding to death on stage”. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a woman drowning before the eyes of the audience – slowly, painfully and without hope of salvation. It combines the miracle of theatre at its best with the soul-draining misery of life at its worst. It’s simultaneously brilliant and awful, a must-see production that one wouldn’t recommend to one’s worst enemy.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing continues at the Factory Theatre until Sat, Jan 30. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.tobaccofactorytheatres.com/shows/a-girl-is-a-half-formed-thing