Appropriate review: Skirting cliché while offering uneasy truths

APPROPRIATE

Bewley’s Café Theatre

★★★★

Planning a wedding is like preparing for war, Sorcha declares, and we believe her. Having “done the ground work” to secure a ring on her finger in time for a Christmas engagement photo, she has left nothing to chance. In actor Sarah-Jane Scott’s engrossing writing début, rituals of marriage and conventions of small town Irish life have been updated to accommodate Instagram, but continue to grip tightly.

Initially satirical, Sorcha gives a winningly tongue-in-cheek account of how she fought off the competition for her man, the dependable county hurling star, Marty. Stepping away from her own wedding reception, she pauses for breath. Scott’s script offers uneasy truths, briefly glimpsed by Sorcha: that what she thought would make her happy had not been updated since early childhood. Along the way she had become “a bystander” in her own life.

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Skirting cliché, but avoiding a neat resolution, director Paul Meade and Scott artfully negotiate the emotional shifts of this affecting solo.