Aoife Dunne: Good Grief
3Olympia Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Aoife Dunne takes a quick census: how many women, how many Irish and how many foreigners are in the 3Olympia Theatre audience on Sunday night?
She singles out a Romanian audience member – “we all think you’re a drug dealer” – and lightly ribs a woman from Leitrim, who, the comedian says, sounds relieved to be anywhere but there.
It’s a confident start to the evening, establishing Dunne as someone comfortable enough to improvise and introducing her theme: Irish identity.
She then settles into an autobiographical narrative beginning when she’s 23 and heading to Brazil, where she can’t fail to notice the difference between Irish and Brazilian attitudes to sex and the body: Irish women are repressed, shame-ridden and slightly prudish; Brazilian women are effortlessly sensual and at ease. A particularly good line compares Irish women’s orgasms to a scene from The Exorcist.
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Dunne delivers it all with sharp timing, but this is well-worn ground. A prolonged section about waxing and body hair feels overextended, and jokes about being embarrassed by the “white bits” on underwear aim for relatability but are a bit tiresome.
These sections of Dunne’s set rely on broad assumptions about the women in the audience – that we’re all a bit easily scandalised, perhaps. Lines such as “The height of pleasure for an Irish woman is being toasty in a dressing gown from Penneys” get laughs but also feel like lowest-common-denominator humour.
Even jokes about Brazilian or Latino men mispronouncing her name during sex, though delivered with flair, don’t quite escape the gravitational pull of cliche.
The evening pivots dramatically when Dunne recounts receiving a phone call in Brazil to tell her that her mother has died. The lighting shifts, the tone darkens and the performance becomes something far more compelling.
Dunne, who is now in her late 30s, is at her best here. Her description of grief as a “black tree of molasses” inside her, heavy, sticky and potentially contagious, rings very true. She captures the isolating, self-sabotaging aspects of grief, describing cancelled plans and a creeping sense of disconnection. These moments are arresting in a way the earlier comedy isn’t.
The comedian’s relationship with her mother, and the way her death left Dunne feeling stuck, become the heart of the show. Bad, distorting grief leads the younger Dunne to behave in ways that, looking back, she’s not proud of – “I have cheated on everyone I have ever loved”, she remarks as a twentysomething.
Such honesty means that a sequence in which Dunne imagines having HIV before a nurse gives her the all-clear feels unnecessary. There’s enough real tragedy in her story not to need hypothetical misfortune.
By far Dunne’s best joke is a story about agreeing to watch pornography with a partner but insisting it has to be feminist porn – only for its narrative and backstory to drag on so long that he falls asleep.
It’s sharp, specific and hilarious, offering a real insight into millennial womanhood. Moments like this show what Dunne is capable of. When she leans into something a little darker, a little truer, the effect is striking. With luck she’ll go there more often in future.
Aoife Dunne: Good Grief is at Kinvara Hall, Co Galway, on Saturday, April 25th; Town Hall Theatre, Westport, on Friday, May 1st; Gleneagle INEC Arena, Killarney, Co Kerry, on Friday, May 8th; and Cavan Arts Festival on Friday, May 15th; the tour continues until November
