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Tom Moran Is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar review: Vulnerable exploration of a journey from self-hatred to self-fulfilment

Theatre: More than any other factor, the catharsis he is seeking onstage is an attempt to process trauma that he feels stems from an insecure attachment at home

Winner of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Award in 2023, Moran is an emerging playwright and actor based in Dublin. Photograph: Abbey Theatre

Tom Lordan
Thu May 2 2024 - 10:01

Tom Moran Is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar

Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆

A one-person play is a risky venture. Reduce the elements of any performance to a single contributor and you seem to be inviting danger: everything hangs on the talents of just one individual. Worse yet, the format precludes, by its very nature, the possibility of the kind of back-and-forth dialogue that compels even the most jaded theatre audience’s attention. Given the obvious obstacles that this genre is forced to overcome, those few actors who brave the limelight in solitude must have nerves of steel. Having witnessed the psychological terrain that Tom Moran covers in the space of 70-odd minutes, and in spite of his many other self-confessed flaws, nerve, we can comfortably assert, is not something that he lacks.

Winner of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Award in 2023, Moran is an emerging playwright and actor based in Dublin. Tom Moran Is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar debuted at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2022, winning the Fishamble new-writing award, and is now on as tour of the country, beginning on the Peacock stage at the Abbey Theatre. The timing of the show’s gestation fits neatly with its themes and mode of presentation: the endless months of lockdown, which encouraged a particular form of anxiety-ridden introspection among so many of us, is an essential ingredient of the show’s DNA.

Over the course of the evening, Moran takes the audience on a confessional whistle-stop tour of his childhood and early adulthood in the 1990s and 2000s: Big Brother and getting fingered on Love Island are used as cultural touchstones to orient our feeling for the era during which the impressionable Moran developed into maturity. His major theme, as you may have guessed from the title, is the issue of deception: the deceptions that we invent for others and, more importantly, the deceptions that we maintain for ourselves.

Moran’s parents loom large. More than any other factor, the catharsis he is seeking onstage is an attempt to process trauma that he feels stems from an insecure attachment at home. His father is portrayed as having, in stereotypically Irish fashion, a bone-deep aversion for directly communicating love for his son, though Moran warmly relates that he has learned to pepper his texts with love-heart emojis.

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The playwright’s mother features in a more complicated role: in some of his early reminiscences, especially acute in a memory that unpacks the germ of Moran’s anxiety about body weight, she provides solace and heartfelt affection; and at other, later stages in the narrative, she is revealed as the source of handwritten letters that puncture the emotional safety of his childhood, giving birth to the overwhelming sense of familial precarity that would only be grappled with, years later, during sessions of much-needed therapy.

At times, Moran’s bubbly persona veers into glassy-eyed sadness a little too quickly, and the occasional use of flared lighting to signpost the oncoming of a “serious” emotion is overly artificial, detracting from the naked honesty of those episodes. That said, Moran’s charisma carries the audience through these jagged moments mostly unscathed, and his vulnerable exploration of a journey from self-hatred to self-fulfilment, thanks in no small part to the insights of his therapist, contains pearls of wisdom for those who are open to hearing them.

Tom Moran Is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar continues at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, May 25th

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