Theatre review: Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks

Not shying away from a smuttily comic title, Sarah Hanly's debut monologue Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks maintains a similar irreverent tone throughout, taking on eating disorders, drug abuse, death and women's social inequality with an incongruously breezy tone. Hanly herself plays Saoirse, whose story begins as a rebellious teenager in an Irish Catholic school, where on the one hand she's talking back to her teachers, exposing the hypocrisies everyone just seems to go along with and demanding a meaningful sex education. On the other hand she's not as in control as she outwardly appears, disappearing into the toilets several times a day to make herself sick. The monologue is framed as Saoirse speaking to her friend Aisling, a fellow anorexic, trying to keep her enthusiastic about life by recounting wild tales from her teens, and catching her up on what's happened since she moved to Dagenham to go to drama school.

But the themes Saoirse covers are much less linear than her story, as the conflicting messages given to her by her Catholic upbringing (when her father left the family they held a mock funeral for him for appearances' sake; then her mother more or less openly shacked up with the local priest) continue to affect her into adulthood.

So the eating disorder she's done a lot of good work kicking is always threatening to rear its head again at the first sign of trauma. And the nuns' reproach of her sexual experimentation at school means she's still coy about defining her sexuality. (The purple of the title is the word she prefers to use for herself rather than lesbian; the snowflakes are cocaine; and the titty wanks are titty wanks.) She also identifies the Church as making it even harder in Ireland than everywhere else for women to be treated equally to men, and the cycle of injustice she experienced continues into another generation when her niece discovers the girls got less Confirmation money than the boys, and that's how it's always been.

Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks is I guess largely about how certain trauma can follow you around however much you change your life, which is why its themes keep coming back. Hanly's performance is a bit broader than I could easily relate to, but with a sloping set (by Jacob Lucy) for her to run around, dramatic lighting changes (by Elliot Griggs) and props falling from the skies, Alice Fitzgerald's production avoids the monologue looking static or visually dull. There's also a veritable Mary Poppins bum bag out of which endless props materialise (as well as, in keeping with the show's gleeful sex-positivity, doubling as a metaphorical vagina for Saoirse to root around in.)

Ultimately although there's a couple of new takes on this kind of confessional monologue, and it feels like it's coming from a very personal, autobiographical place, I'm not sure there's much about the play to make me remember it above many similar ones I've seen over the years. It never really grabbed me, and it wasn't one of those shows that made me easily empathise with an experience very far from my own. Women around Hanly's age in the audience, though, were clearly very moved by the experience by the end.

Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks by Sarah Hanly is booking until the 12th of February at the Royal Court's Jerwood Theatre Upstairs (returns and day tickets only.)

Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Luca Truffarelli.