Aisling Bea: Older Than Jesus
Vicar Street, Dublin
★★★★☆
“Jesus was someone I looked up to a lot growing up,” Aisling Bea jokes at Vicar Street on Sunday night, referring to the picture of Christ that hung in her home.
The line comes from Older Than Jesus, her new show, in which the comedian tackles themes of growing up in Catholic Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. Older Than Jesus is not a mournful lament, however; rather, it radiates joy.
Bea talks about being an altar boy – “I was always a woman in a male-dominated field,” she says – ageing as a woman, and becoming a mother.
Stepping on to the stage in a dressing gown and hair rollers, Bea kicks off with a short set of older material before Shane Daniel Byrne, her opening act, appears. After explaining that she’s looking dishevelled because she’s not ready for the main show just yet, she delivers a line on being diagnosed with ADHD later in life.
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“The doctor who diagnosed me said he remembered seeing me at Live at the Apollo a few years ago and thinking, Oh, she definitely has ADHD. “He could’ve have sent me an email,” she quips.
Bea has been a television-comedy mainstay for more than a decade, regularly appearing on QI, 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and The Last Leg, among other programmes. Viewers know that she is brilliant, quick-witted and slightly kooky.
But what you can easily forget is just how charming Bea is. She oozes likeability, making people laugh without coming across as mean spirited or punching down.
Just because she is light doesn’t mean she is without edge, though: she delivers sharp one-liners about JK Rowling, Bill Gates and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – who as a Pisces, she says, “feels everything”.
[ Aisling Bea: I want to be ‘easy and nice’ but sometimes it is not possibleOpens in new window ]
The main part of her set is about her relationship with religion, becoming a mother at 40 and, as the show’s title implies, now being older than Jesus Christ was when he died.
She articulates with warmth and humour how strange it is to live with a father in her home for the first time in almost four decades; her own father died when she was three. “I do the dad jokes while Jack” – Bea’s partner, the musician Jack Freeman – “feeds the baby”.
She glows when speaking about their daughter, Saoirse, who is now just over 18 months old, rounding out a gig that delivers clever one-liners, offbeat physical gags and delicious full-circle stories.
To close the show, Like a Prayer fills the auditorium, and Bea shakes an altar bell to the Madonna track, having dealt with the ins and outs of Catholicism without once reverting to despair.
