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Twenty years after The Vagina Monologues premiered at Broadway, Eve Ensler’s iconic play might not seem as scandalous as it used to be. On January 19th, the enumeration of synonyms for ‘vagina’ that opened the play elicited more laugh than uneasiness from the – mostly feminine – audience of the dlr Mill Theatre. Later on, when one of the bold performers invited the audience to profess after her the word ‘cunt,’ the public did not spare their clapping but no one took on to repeat after her.

This is by no means a criticism of the production of The Vagina Monologues directed by Reidin Dunne, only the proof that she was right in rewriting or inventing certain sections of the play for it to retain in 2018 all its topicality. Indeed, Dunne did not resent breaking away from the original staging. One actress, dressed up as the slightly sadistic coach in charge of a fitness camp, replaces the three usual narrators. The successive statements are delivered without the indications given in the original script. For the spectator, there is thus no way of knowing that the moving middle-aged woman who tells the story of an atrocious rape in times of war is in fact enacting a Bosnian girl under 20. This absence of context gives The Vagina Monologues’ words the universality that the play is sometimes said to lack.

On the other hand, another achievement of the cast and crew is to provide not only a replication of an almost classic play but an adaptation perfectly adequate to the Irish context. Whereas some critics complained in 1996 that Ensler did not tackle the issue of reproductive rights, Dunne has invented a new monologue during which an Irish woman recounts how she became a mum at seventeen and the stigma that ensued. Her compelling soliloquy then evolves into a call for empowering Irish girls and young women and setting them free of what she calls “a legacy of shame.” The final scene is very relevant to this aim. After having taken turns at talking and singing, the thirteen actresses, bathed in a green hue, gather in a choreography made of sudden movements and shout in unison. In a grand final, they stubbornly repeat “We’re sorry,” hence paying tribute to all Irish women, especially the ones that have been tortured in ‘laundries,’ the ones that died as Savita Halappanavar and the ones that decided to fight for their peers.