The Dolldrums
Boys’ School, Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
We’re back in a 1990s heyday of badass schoolgirls during one scene in The Dolldrums, Liath Hannon’s impressively slick play for Jaxbanded Theatre. A trans girl from Dublin who’s sent to an adventure camp in the coastal southeast is seen making new friends, bonding over Buffy the Vampire Slayer and rehearsing a talent-show performance of Britney Spears’s ...Baby One More Time.
A smooth outsider, Lily masks her desperation for acceptance and experience with dark humour. In fact, the inspiration for Hannon’s remarkable performance seems to be a different end-of-the-century cool girl, as Lily relaxes into the same grin as Winona Ryder’s in Heathers, flirting with danger and transmuting pain into jokes.
She makes light of life’s grit, being casual about the devastating end of a camp romance with a boy who’s unaware she’s trans: “He said he wanted to finger me one day. Then he knew.”
Such rejections are presented as cooled off and jaded, as Hannon – star of the recent film Girls & Boys – and the play’s director, Ois O’Donoghue, seize connections with the stylish cynicism of film noir. One bruising encounter makes for one of the play’s funniest sequences, when Lily, a teen making a fresh start at a new school, manages to seduce a partying rugby player who’s a total airhead. (“He made me a drink he learned in Marbella.”)
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She insists it’s for the sake of role-play, but during their horrendous sex we hear her internal voice: “When is he going to say he loves you?”
That subconsciousness speaks up from below a world that’s grubby and soulless on the surface. When Lily notices a doctor hesitate about referring her to gender-affirming surgery (Ruairí Nicholl performs the play’s revolving door of masked men), it becomes a funnily grim seduction, with her batting her lashes and him insisting on a “physical examination”.
The source of the play’s suspicion is a cisgender world with illusionary pathways towards self-acceptance. When Lily moves to Glasgow for drama school, and begins a loving relationship with a fellow student, she continues to “live stealth”, concealing her transness in order to pass as cisgender.
It’s a decision not without some industry critique. (“Nobody will cast me,” she says tearfully to herself.) Eventually, the warm comfort of her life – watching Richard Linklater and Jean-Luc Godard movies with her boyfriend – becomes interrupted by an online campaign trying to out her.
In the play’s latter stages, during an escape to Paris to hide in a spiral of abuse and drugs, Lily decides to use coming out as a cruel jab against a brutal boyfriend, but that settles into yet another grim horizon. (“I told him to embarrass him. Then he left,” she says. “But he came back ... with a ring!”)
Hannon’s delivery of casualness is so good that it occasionally struggles to be heard, as if trying to avoid looking as if it’s working too hard. There’s no denying its coherence, however, as Lily’s internal voice arrives in a time of need: “We’ve known who we are. We wouldn’t have gotten this far if we didn’t.”
The Dolldrums is at Smock Alley, Dublin 8, until Saturday, November 8th
