Dublin Fringe Festival 2026: Daddy Issues (Helene Ott review)
Daddy Issues by Brigid Leahy. Image uncredited
*****
“The old is dying and the new cannot be born” Antonio Gramsci once wrote in the prison cell of the Italian fascists. Identifying the dangerous meaning-gap arising from social discontinuity and stasis. Now, in recent culture and politics, it has felt as though the inability to conceptualise the future has created insistence to rebirth the past. To mythologise and revert to traditionalism. The trad wife lifestyle emerged as one of such morbid symptoms during the quarantine. All over tik-tok women started discarding modern gender roles in favour of full-time motherhood and homemaking. A trend quickly latched onto by right wing politicians and pro-natalist tech elites, happily using it as a cultural vehicle for their agenda. In Brigid Leahy’s new play Daddy Issues this phenomenon is deliciously materialised as women become not simply symbolic vessels of their ideology and the past but the literal mothers of it.
Abigail (Brigid Leahy) and Joan (Gemma Kane) are the stars of the new Amazon reality TV show “State of Gestation” documenting the highs and lows of two planned pregnancies. But these aren’t your typical buns in the oven. Abigail and Joan are carrying - yup, you guessed it: the cloned fetuses of Abraham Lincoln and Michael Collins. Prancing around in a mid-victorian floral gown and rifle, 2 examples of Dara Gill’s perfectly ridiculous costume design, Abigail first appears as a hyper-exaggerated representation of the trad-crop. Unlike the all-American beauty queens online however, she is forced into a simulation of Nancy Lincoln’s reality to assure clone-baby Abraham's proper development into the president America now needs more than ever. At least according to everyone’s favourite tech-billionaire and Abigail’s baby daddy: Jeff Bezos. And yeah, the creatively-impaired AI-fetishists turning to cloning next - seems likely.
Since Irish corporate tax benefits are just impossible to pass up Abigail is cast to drudgery in a rustic Wicklow cabin instead of Kentucky, where she churns butter and shoots squirrels to eat. A lifestyle closer to Wolverine’s exile than the gilded cage Ballerina Farm. Abigail's consequent unraveling is played to perfection by Leahy herself, both highly comedic and curiously sincere. Abigail operates under unblinking insistence that she is saving America. And if that means living to breed and die, that is her patriotic choice, right? But of course as so often in choice-feminism, it’s a false one, here easily traced back to the psychological leash held by Abby’s denim-clad conservative single father (David Michael Scott), who happily profits off selling his daughter to public consumption. With Abigail aiming for his approval rather than celebrity.
Encountering her with pity and ridicule, (although definitely relating to the Daddy Issues) Joan’s reason for becoming a clone-mommy is however just that. Explaining she wants to give Michael Collins a second chance to possibly redeem the great betrayal, she is mainly self-promoting her future biography about raising him. Having chosen this single-mother persona over her ex-husband (Gabriel Adewusi) she happily reduces herself to the manufactured mouthpiece of working-class women. Reciting these polemics like slam poetry, hilariously delivered by Kane, who fills the character with enough personality to make up for Joan’s shallowness. Although treating Abigail like feminism’s foe, Joan quickly assumes the arc of the now outdated girl-boss. Aspiring to break glass ceilings but really just climbing the ladder and pulling it up when Abigail needs her most.
It is this core conflict between two failed models of contemporary womanhood that ground the play in emotional sincerity throughout rib-scraping comedy, skilfully directed by Jeda De Bri. Clare Barrett brilliantly embodies the blundering stereotype of a studio executive about to crack, with line deliveries I deeply wish I could replay. Similarly manic, Sean Burke’s show host, who is also the cloned JFK, evokes the rictus laughter of Jimmy Fallon and uncanny patience of Chris Hansen. Manifesting a sanitised optimism that masks a vape addiction and the possibly strongest case of the titular daddy issues. Both Barrett and Burke beautifully exemplify the banal horror of the American culture industry. Perfectly conjured by Mar Parés Baraldés’ Reality TV Set- and Hannah Bevan’s Lighting Design.
Leahy demonstrates a distinct understanding and perspective on our cultural moment. And since keeping up with the absurdity of reality is becoming increasingly difficult for satirists, Leahy is getting edgy and really, really weird with it. Crafting a play that is too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. Uniquely depraved and disaffected but also genuinely heartfelt. Reminding us that where it feels that reality devolved to worse than impasse, turning to past mythology is the greatest absurdity.
Daddy Issues by Brigid Leahy runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2026 at Smock Alley Theatre till Sept 12
For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival
