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Since they were children, Saoirse has been warned that her best friend Siobhan is “leading [her] down the wrong garden path” – Siobhan used to write bad words in the margins of her copybooks, and copy the answers to school tests on her thighs, while Saoirse would check her homework three times every evening. Saoirse longingly describes visits to her house, where there is “no such thing as silence”, compared to her sad, silent house, in which she and her brother are forbidden from playing indoors, and her father distances himself from her because of her resemblance to Saoirse’s dead mother. Siobhan begins to change in secondary school, becoming more promiscuous and voluptuous, yet Saoirse still “admired her — the way she always left her mark, on people and places, on fellas and school desks”. She notes, “at mass, men would stare at her arse instead of at the altar”. Siobhan even has a signature hairstyle, while Saoirse can’t find one no matter how many she tries to copy from women’s magazines.
These flashbacks and anecdotes weave in and out of the events of a night in Wilson’s pub. The narrative split is demarcated by the shifts in lighting — the warm amber shades indicate her fond childhood memories, while the lights turn blue as she tells us about the night that left her pregnant. Hildegard Ryan avoids the static direction that can bog down a one-person show, as Saoirse recounts her stories in the attic she uses as a sewing room, a subtly effective set designed by David Doyle which functions as a reflection of her most intimate, private space.
Saoirse is deeply naive about sex, and about alcohol, but finds herself introduced to both simultaneously on this unfortunate night, after Siobhan badgers her to “stop being such a dry shite”. Although she wants to leave, the boys keep buying her drinks, and eventually Tommy (“the good-looking one”) invites her to go home with them. “I didn’t want to disappoint him,” Saoirse explains, so “I decided to be wild, just this once.” Saoirse gives a heartbreaking account of what transpired later, recalling, “I shagged Tommy that night […] or rather, he shagged me. I had no idea what I was doing and it was really painful. There was a pile of six Christmas cakes in the corner and I counted them, wanting it to be over.”
Although set in a small rural town in Limerick in the 1980s, this story could plausibly be set in the present. O’Connor has said that “the naivety of Saoirse is the naivety of Ireland”, but the show never slips into in-your-face pro-choice polemic. Instead, the play’s quiet power comes from skillfully humanising the often very isolating issue of abortion through empathy with one girl and her experience. As she travels to London, the story of Saoirse’s abortion is told through her encounters with other people along the way. This approach effectively dismisses horror stories about cold, lonely, faceless procedures by introducing a calm, friendly nurse at the clinic and Siobhan’s cheerful aunt who tells Saoirse, “It’ll be fine you know, I’ll say a decade of the rosary for you.”
My name is Saoirse is a one-woman show, written and performed by Eva O’Connor. O’Connor is stunning, and has the audience hanging on her every word from the first moment to the last as she maintains a mesmerising balance between deeply moving and riotously funny moments throughout. She seamlessly transitions from the soft-spoken Saoirse into a variety of colourful impersonations as diverse as a kind Northern Irish nurse to the boisterous Siobhan. While Saoirse, the naive, wide-eyed innocent, could have easily been a cliched, one-note character, O’Connor’s portrayal of her is compelling and wholly believable. By bringing such a tender, mournful quality to Saoirse’s tone and rhythms, it’s impossible to avoid becoming rapt in her story. A captivating performance.
