A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

Eimear McBride’s novel offered a glimpse of hope for independent publishing houses when it was passed over by the big ones and picked up by Galley Beggar Press in 2013. This stage version by Annie Ryan is less an adaptation and more a transcription, but its potency is entirely undiminished.

It is the recollection of an Irish girl, raped by her uncle and ravaged by life. The prose flows like a river as it runs through crises of faith and family. 

The gloomy lights go up in the most deadening silence, in which the slightest shuffle or creak is audible. Aoife Duffin dominates in that silence. She stands on a gritty, mucky stage, green and textured like moss. Four fluorescent strip lights hang in a row, changing their intensity and colour with imperceptible shifts. 

With subtle changes in voice and gesture she becomes the different characters in her stream-of-consciousness narrative. She moves little, but always with care and precision. As a child attempting to make sense of the fractured narrative of her life, her memories of her family and the people she meets are enlarged, often comic.

The Corn Exchange’s production is a fully formed thing, relying on the absolute power of two things: acting and words, both crafted to near perfection.