Pinching for My Soul

Focus Theatre, Dublin

"It's like EastEnderson one side, Coronation Streeton the other," says Shania, a drug addict, describing her neighbours in the flat in Dublin where she lives. It is an apt description of Elizabeth Moynihan's amusing and bemusing play, which fits as many extreme plot lines into an hour and 20 minutes as the omnibus edition of a soap opera. There are several incidents of shoplifting, two arrests, two sexual assaults, one accidental murder, a drug overdose, a nervous breakdown, death by drowning, and a reincarnation. This is nothing unusual by the standards of daytime TV, but it is a rare opportunity for a slice of light-hearted commentary on Irish life for a theatre audience.

The play traces the relationship between three characters: Shania (Emma Colohan), who thieves to feed her drug habit; “Foxrock fanny” Brona (Geraldine Plunkett), who steals to get her politician husband’s attention; and Chike (Seun Shote), a full-time security guard and part-time writer, who uses the two “pinchers” as inspiration for his new novel.

Each of the characters is delineated by Moynihan’s finely tuned attention to language and idiom, but the characterisations themselves are broad stereotypes of social class and education.

Is this necessarily a case of bad writing, however, or are the cliches the point of Moynihan's play? Pinching for My Soulis structured as a series of interweaving monologues, but Moynihan pushes the format by including a meta- theatrical device, which is hinted at early on in the piece but comes to fruition only in the dramatic climax, as Moynihan asks us to consider whether Shania and Brona are real characters or just figments of Chike's imagination. And yet as the two women start critiquing Chike's work, the flaws they point out in the preceding hour of the play are undeniably true: hackneyed storylines, predictable behaviours and more. Does the self-awareness of the postmodern structural trick excuse them? Well, not really.

"Things get a bit messy when the two world collide," Chike says as he considers the potential in the new perspective that his characters offer him as the play comes to a close. Unfortunately, the confusion is something that Blanche McIntyre, the director, cannot resolve. The first part of Pinching for My Soulis entertaining, contemporary comedy with an edge, but the last 10 minutes are a mess.