A Girl is a Half-formed Thing comes to the Tobacco Factory having previously been a great success at the 2014 Dublin Theatre Festival and again at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Adapted from Eimear McBride’s acclaimed first novel, it features some characters and events frequently encountered in Irish fiction, including an abandoned mother, a wayward child, and piety and abuse in equal measure. But the novel itself is by no means conventional in style, for it is written as a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness monologue that takes the unnamed girl from very early childhood through to adulthood. Using little more than a bare stage and subtle shifts in lighting, Annie Ryan’s production has transferred this story to the stage in an entirely convincing way. Aoife Duffin’s superb solo performance is eighty minutes of intensely engaging drama.
There are flashes of wry humour and moments of heartfelt tenderness, but this is an undeniably bleak tale of a girl whose father has walked out leaving her with an embittered, vindictive mother and a brother with brain cancer. It would perhaps be an intolerably pessimistic story were it not for the fresh inventiveness and wit of the language. We hear the changes in the girl’s powers of expression as she grows, exploring new ways to give voice to her experiences. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is tough going at times, unflinching in its portrayal of the degradation and near disintegration that follows when, aged thirteen, the girl is abused by her uncle. Finding no solace in the rigid dogma of her family’s Catholicism, and no respite from the capricious cruelty of her mother, she turns to a particularly disturbing kind of self-harm, punishing herself with a series of affectionless and often brutal sexual encounters. At one point she rapidly lists a string of such experiences, each one prefaced with ‘I met a man… I met a man.’ We do not condemn the girl for what might seem sluttish recklessness, for we can only too clearly see the causes of her behavior, and the narrative keeps us aware of the woman she would have become had life treated her more kindly. She is intelligent, bookish even; she has fundamental honesty and a brave rebelliousness; above all she has a deeply moving affection for her damaged brother.
Aoife Duffin’s portrayal of the girl has been described as ‘career-defining’, and it is certainly hard to imagine how anyone could do it better. Though the entire play is essentially an inner monologue, each separate character that features in the girl’s story is brought vividly to life. Duffin swiftly changes from one character to another with protean skill; one moment she is a threatening playground bully, the next the lascivious uncle, a snobbish aunt or a condemnatory grandfather. The confrontations between mother and daughter are frighteningly real. An astonishingly brave performance, and one not to be missed. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 28th January 2016
