Dim. Gloomy. Young woman. Alone on stage. Sweats and pyjama bottoms. Bare feet on earth. Low voice she uses. Speaking in clumps. Fistfuls of words at a time. Not sentences. As if thoughts. Coming out direct. Too strong to be shaped into full. So we get the pure meaning. Not fancied up.

Only, of course, it is. I’m sorry, I can’t sustain this pastiche, and you wouldn’t thank me if I did. Also, my attempt sounds like Beckett, whereas Eimear McBride’s protagonist favours a more Joycean interior monologue, here adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan (who also directs) from McBride’s 2013 novel. But the thing about those other two Irish writers is that Beckett used such a technique principally in plays which last only a few minutes, and Joyce as one style among many in his Ulysses. To hear nothing else for 85 minutes grows wearing, as a number of readers find over 200-odd pages of the novel.

McBride’s account is of a girl/young woman growing up in an oppressive family and social environment, developing a dysfunctional sexual compulsion as a result of abuse. The style matches it well, but the material is as relentless as the presentation. Performer Aoife Duffin shows phenomenal discipline and memory skills, but she doesn’t actually get to do much… hardly even speak: often she delivers her words through a slack mouth, the lips barely moving, as if articulation itself would betray the content by making it too flash. She has an opportunity to scream a couple of lines just before the one-hour mark, and to bellow the protagonist’s mother’s comprehensively wrong-headed denunciation of her daughter shortly before the end, but everything else is in the same not-quite-mumble.

I found myself watching as if this were a durational work. Such pieces normally last several hours, and their concern is with how the viewer’s response varies, attunes, perhaps deepens, over time. It’s odd to apply that kind of sensibility to a conventionally marketed one-act play. Then again, a play has some kind of dramatic arc or progression. McBride tells not a story so much as a chronicle. One thing happens, then another, then another. Then it stops.

Written for the Financial Times.