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Four young women sit on the floor in a square, facing inward. A game starts. We are not told the rules but it is something like charades: each woman performs a mini-narrative inspired by actions and questions written on blue and red cards concerning the relationship between women’s bodies, abortion, and the Catholic Church. We get the sense that each woman has something personal invested in their performance even though they are ostensibly communicating generalities. An electric guitarist plays live, punctuating the scene and reacting to the movements of the performers.

This is one of the episodes that ARISE begins with and it introduces themes that are threaded through the whole performance. Without ever being didactic or moralistic, the play explores how performance and ritual function in our daily lives and attempts to reconcile the personal with the general. It unravels in episodes and each one is roughly structured around the four interweaving narratives that each performer develops throughout the play. It’s probably best to allow the performances to wash over you as a series of fragments and draw sense from them as and when they recall or juxtapose each other. But ARISE is not totally chaotic. Slowly, a sort of coming-of-age structure is discernible.

At the start, the way that the Catholic Church has influenced societal attitudes towards women in Ireland is called into question. We are told: “So, you can’t get an abortion in Ireland – if you want one you’ll have to get a plane ticket… probably to the UK”. The way that this issue impinges on every heterosexual encounter that Irish women have is clearly related to the anxieties that pervade the play. A moment later the performers turn on the audience to shake their hands, grinning and saying “Peace be with you” in that earnest, aggressively polite way that anyone who has been to church knows all too well. In between, we see one performer rocking a baby in her arms, another shopping, and another getting dressed and redressed and redressed (all mimed). This, the play seems to say, is the world that Irish girls are born into. These are the rituals and attitudes that they have to reconcile and internalize.

“The first man I ever loved…” chant the performers in unison as they stomp around childishly in a circle, “was my father.” They go on to articulate four different father figures before being drawn back into a circle chanting “I love you! I love you!” which quickly becomes “Yeah, ok… whatever… I love you, ok.” Now, we realise, we have entered into the second stage: the girls are becoming teenagers who are rapidly becoming, or trying to be, young women. The rest of the play charts, or deconstructs, this process. We get comic skits, like one in which the performers talk about their relationships with their “puppies”, “blue-tits”, and “coconuts”. And later there is a clubbing scene in which the performers dispense with words entirely, instead communicating in grunts and squeals punctuated with grotesque facial expressions and gestures. Alongside the more conventional narratives the actors perform wild and weird dances: intimate one second, violent and ecstatic the next. We see microcosmic relationships unfold in which gender and sexuality appear to be totally fluid.

The play ends with the performers recovering from their night by sitting in a row, undoing each other’s hair, talking admiringly about their mothers and nostalgically about their childhood. We get the sense that, for better or for worse, they are adjusting and developing in order to find their place in society full of contradictions and temptations, full of responsibilities and possibilities. ACNE, the company that wrote and performed ARISE under the direction of Aisling Rachel Madden, are planning to take their play to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. If you want to get a sense of what it is like to be a young woman growing up in Ireland, go and see ARISE. It will confront you, but it will also make you laugh.