Kitty In The Lane. Jack Studio Theatre.

Kitty lives with her dying father in a run-down house two miles from the nearest road. She has baked him a birthday sponge cake which the vituperative old man, decaying in bed and seemingly watching surveillance cameras, most certainly does not deserve. His was a brutal, mercenary, and abusive type of anti-parenting. He has raised a brutalised, broken, almost feral daughter, who grieves for the recent suicide of sibling Dennis, her only real companion.

Bedecked in a flimsy blue hand-me-down dress gifted by her competitive on-off friend Saleisha, Kitty waits for boyfriend Robert to pick her up in his van. She is anxious to get to the local village pageant, the only form of fun in this rural dystopia. As she waits on her date’s uncharacteristically late arrival, the country girl slugs dad’s whisky and mulls over events that have brought her here. Just why is Robert so late and what is really in the large gift package so carefully wrapped in the floor? Be warned, this Kitty’s got claws.

Performer and writer Áine Ryan delivers up a grim but hugely satisfying serving of camp folk horror in Kitty In The Lane. Mocked by local villagers, bullied (and much worse) by the local garda, her protagonist lives a lonely, joyless existence in the dark underbelly of rural Irish life. Ostensibly set in the present day this is really a morality tale from a darker, older Emerald Isle. When a wave of unstoppable and inevitable rage finally engulfs Kitty there is a distant echo of Brian De Palma’s ‘70s horror movie Carrie. A blood red dress features in both movie and play.

Ryan writing style is sublime, with more than a hint of James Joyce’s cavalier approach to structure. Kitty has a sibylline style of speaking all her own, one that acknowledges but subverts the rhythms and cadences of the rural Irish vernacular. Verbs, often misused, are scattered arbitrarily in random corners of long, oblique, sentences. “Thronged it does be, a proper Mardi Gras” she says of the pageant she is frantic to get to. “None of that juicing for dairy from me either tomorrow. These fists will facilitate no pumping” is how Kitty describes a day off milking the cows. It is a complex, rewarding style of writing that both defines character and marks out Kitty’s isolated environment as alien, hostile, and somehow other-worldly.

In the hands of a lesser performer Kitty In The Lane’s tone and structure might seem contrived, but Ryan is a consummate actor who knows her work inside out. She spits out dialogue in all directions like bullets on a battlefield. It is a manic, mesmerising, near unmissable performance.

Writer: Áine Ryan

Director: Jack Reardon