“Don’t let the beast get you” Myra’s father warns from his death bed.
The beast being permanently “on the gargle” and the sickness that it brings. It’s here we find Myra (played by Fionna Hewitt-Twamley) a Dubliner on a downward spiral looking back on her life, a life that was once bright with love and a future.
Despite hardship, she was happily married with a baby and part of a working-class community.
Soon life began to unravel until stripped away to nothing. Devastating events such as a miscarriage, the death of her infant son to cot-death and the wider cultural trauma of the Troubles in the North all have an impact.
Her husband from Derry, Tommy, goes home to take part in the Civil Rights march that became Bloody Sunday on January 30th 1972. Tommy returns home to Dublin a different man, his white shirt stained with blood.
Myra forlornly describes the loss of innocence from that day on.
The intensity is broken up by salty humour and the diverse ways Myra asks the audience for spare change, when generosity is sparing one woman is described as having “a face like a lizard”, another is called a “miserable bastard”.
Hewitt-Twamley is a revelation using every facial expression and contortion she can muster. Her assortment of voices is also impressive as she flits through a range of characters from the pen of playwright Brian Foster.
Myra reminds us that she is not a leper but someone with a sickness, someone with a backstory and someone, like everyone, who should be treated with some dignity and compassion.
