Cork Midsummer Festival 2025: Stitch

Irene Kelleher in Stitch. Image, Marcin Lewandowski

****

What is it about physically demanding theatre at Cork Midsummer Festival this year? Whilst Eileen Walsh deservedly takes the durational plaudits, and every other plaudit imaginable, Irene Kelleher is no slouch when it comes to pushing physical boundaries. Writing and performing two productions concurrently; the comedy Footnote, and the hauntingly dark Stitch. The latter concerning a young woman, Alice, disfigured as a child, who is about to be evicted from the only home she's ever known. The basement of a clothing alteration shop run by her aunt which is about to be turned into an Extravision. Stitch, like Kelleher’s classic Mary and Me, exploring familial shame and generational trauma for unplanned pregnancies in 1980s Ireland, and the often horrific consequences for young women and their unplanned child. Horror being the key word. Kelleher’s breathtaking performance, Cormac O'Connors astonishing lights and sounds, Jenny White's insanely detailed set and props and Valencia Gambardella’s magnificent costumes and masks tipping spectacle into the realms of fantasy. So brilliantly executed you might think you're on the set of a horror movie. But this is a site specific, time specific, woman specific story concerned with real life times and themes. The horror being it could've happened, and that similar horrors, and worse, often did. Director Regina Crowley swirling up a witches brew of extraordinary potency, whose power is punctured somewhat by the poetically rhyming structure of Kelleher’s abstruse script.

Midnight. Halloween. 1989. Samhain Festival. The disfigured Alice, a cross between Frankenstein's daughter and Laura Ingalls had she fallen down a ravine, emerges from the basement into the dim light dragging the shadows with her. Samhain connected with many things in Stitch, most notably the night when the worlds of the living and the dead draw near. Allowing spirits of Halloween’s past to pass over in the form of memories as Alice recounts her haunting story before her final denouement and defining last act. Skulking through the deserted shop, seeking out her cat Stitch, Alice talks, howls, shrieks, growls, drools and prowls as she drags on masks, drags out old clothes, and drags memories kicking and screaming into the frugal light. Alice not so much talking with spirits as channeling them, her body a writhing conduit of contaminated powers compelling her as she traverses dark places seeking out light from the doomed underworld of her soul.

One thing you could never accuse Kelleher of is not taking risks. Mostly she gets it right. Like the site specified shop on 21 Shandon Street which proves deeply haunting, and Might Oak Productions' superlative team giving Alice’s story life. But risks don't always land as you hoped they might, as well as giving far more than you ever imagined. The former being the case with Kelleher’s rhyming script, the latter for her performance and production. Rhyming couplets might evoke incantations, but the words have to have real poetic power which they don’t always have in Stitch. Trying, as they are, to also tell a story, the competing demands leave narrative and characters often unclear as to who, what, when, where and how? If much is clarified in the final minutes, it’s too late to establish the connection needed. The one arising out of empathy for someone you care for whose story you know, like Mia Goth’s Pearl, rather than sympathy for a stranger whose ranting and raving is hard to make sense of. Language made restrictive and restrained to meet rhyming needs less effective when trying to lead. Strongest when led by Kelleher’s guttural performance which is a tour de force. Alice’s howling winds of rage, tenderness and pain leaving words scattered like petals after a storm. Stitch might not be Kelleher’s strongest script, but Alice is Kelleher's wildest, bravest, most compelling performance to date.

Stitch, written and performed by Irene Kelleher, presented by Might Oak Productions, runs at J. Nolan Stationary,  21 Shandon Street as part of Cork Midsummer Festival 2025 June 13-15 and June 18 - 22.

For more information visit Cork Midsummer Festival 2025