‘To me, aged 7. I’ve got you.” Katriona O’Sullivan’s dedication of her bestselling memoir to her younger self is the emotional core of Sonya Kelly’s new stage adaptation. The remarkable story of the author and psychology professor who grew up in poverty in Coventry and Birmingham, her childhood blighted by drug addiction and sexual abuse, is split between the child (Holly Lawlor) and adult (Aisling O’Mara) Katriona, as joint narrators.
With Katriona’s parents (Aidan Kelly and Hilda Fay) breaking into song on a car journey, the early scenes in Róisín McBrinn’s production shift uneasily in tone, as if the older Katrina, looking back, is determined to be upbeat and to keep the utter misery of her parents’ circumstances at a distance. The structure – an episodic, linear narrative – creates some distance too, with frequent references to the autobiography’s page numbers adding to the sense that the book is the blueprint for the play, rather than a starting point for Kelly’s dramatisation.
Moving on to the years of Katriona’s struggles as a teenage mother – initially homeless, then living on welfare – the staging sparks into life with the ensemble (Ghaliah Conroy, Mary Murray, Keiren Hamilton-Amos and Thommas Kane Byrne) conjuring multiple characters, aided by Aedín Cosgrove’s endlessly malleable set design. When the family move to Dublin, Katriona yearns for a new start, but takes refuge in alcohol. The scenes of her therapy and recovery are affectingly raw.
O’Mara captures Katriona’s ferocious will to survive; her determination to sober up and return to formal education. Lawlor pops up winningly in the guise of the Trinity College access programme director who practically drags Katriona to her exams – one of three key adults in Katriona’s life who believe in her and give her hope. This doubling of the actors playing the younger and older Katriona binds the story: swapping places, the spirited seven-year-old girl is now taking care of the astonishingly courageous young woman, scarred but not broken.
