Assembly
Roxy, Edinburgh
Four
stars
The
simple but necessary message of Victoria McNulty’s quietly intense piece of
stand-up spoken-word drama is beamed at the back of the stage at the end of the
show. For the previous hour, McNulty has taken us from Glasgow high-rise to
east-end boozer to what happens after closing time. As told in rough-hewn
rhymes, what began as a piece for the Visible Women festival at Kinning Park
becomes a painfully familiar litany of everyday abuse hiding in plain sight
within a bubble of breadline poverty and hand-me-down sectarianism.
Told
through the experiences of a central figure of a barmaid who bears witness to
drunken excesses, it opens with a recording of independent Irish republican MP
Bernadette Devlin speaking to journalists in 1972 after she slapped the then
Conservative Home Secretary Reginald Maudling. This happened after Maudling claimed
the soldiers who shot dead fourteen civil rights marchers in Derry on what
became known as Bloody Sunday had acted in self-defence. One of the journalists
questioning Devlin suggested she had acted in an un-lady-like manner.
This introduction
is a small but knowing nod, both to institutionalised misogyny and the state
violence that normalises it. McNulty brings things up to date, and shows how
little has changed. Each umbilically linked monologue is punctuated by songs
from Abi Normal, who perches on one side of the stage, guitar in hand like an
open mic night turn, but whose words and music lean more to old-school
political cabaret.
Directed
and produced by Kevin P. Gilday and Cat Hepburn, hosts of Sonnet Youth, the Glasgow-based
self-styled ‘spoken word house party’ and ‘literary rave’ where McNulty became
a slam poetry champion, McNulty’s debut full-length work speaks plainly without
tub-thumping, and is all the more powerful for it. On one level, Confessionals
is a near neighbour of Two, Jim Cartwright’s pub-set odyssey, in which two
actors played both mine hosts and a roll-call of their establishment’s regulars.
By focusing on her barmaid, McNulty’s world is both more intimate and more
brutal in a devastating solo turn.
The Herald, July 23rd 2018
ends
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