Dublin Fringe Festival 2026: Recurrence (Helene Ott review)

A Recurrence by Sophie O’Toole and Trudy Nolan. Image ucredited

*****

In A Recurrence, D'Girlos Theatre Company returns to the Dublin Fringe Festival with a gripping new three-hander following three working-class Dublin women across a 1930s tenement, a 1990s flat, and a modern council house. Co-written by D’Girlos co-founders Trudy Nolan and Sophie O'Toole, this rich and tender play traces their lives through the sudden realisation and struggle of unplanned pregnancy to an ultimate intergenerational reconciliation of the lives that are lived and the stories they become.

Although cornered in the close and dark quarters of a tenement, Minnie brims brightly with imagination. With no option but to stay in the place where she was born, to marry, raise a family, she revolts through a reveling in small pleasures and private moments. Erin Murray Boyne embodies this girlish excitement not as naive fragility but a thick skin protecting her body and heart, concealing a secret that she refuses to be victimised by.

50 years later Jasmine refuses to bear Minnie’s story as a warning but rather carries it as part of herself. Much like all the people in the Fatima Mansions. Even those that were carried away. Pregnant with her late friend Brandon’s baby, she attempts to reconcile her despondent grief with a genuine craving for the world and her blossoming queer sexuality. Sophie O’Toole delivers a dazzlingly electric and vulnerable performance. Making words cut like knives whether softly spoken or fiercely cried out. Achingly alive as she desires to numb herself and discovers a desire that might make the numbing futile all together.

Coming from a modern council house, Grace carries her roots and ghosts with softness and pride but refuses to be defined or limited by them. Submerging herself in college life she breathes the exhilaration of possibility, but simultaneously the loss and split in her life. Ciara Byrne brings a fierce determination and Gen Z post-irony to the character. However never concealing the grieving and yearning wound beneath. Struggling through loss and hope it seems that both Minnie and Jasmine breathe through her. As she carries her roots not as albatross around her neck but through her sorely beating heart.

Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a working-class woman in Ireland. Uncovering the cyclical, shape-shifting nature of poverty and emphasizing the refusal to let complex lives be reduced to cautionary tales. And as the girls teeter the bounds of what is desired of them and can be desired from life, they dance themselves clean, quite literally. Bodies moving in distorted accordance as though they’re possessing each other. Perfectly supplemented by Megan Murphy’s haunting sound design, that weaves shreds of memory into electric beats throughout. Exemplifying that however divergent their paths, their stories echo and remain interwoven. Speaking not directly to, but through and for each other. This emotional journey and severed dialogue actualised through Vlada Hrytsenko’s lighting design, lifting the girls in and out of the spotlight.

Making her directorial debut, Nolan proves to have a highly political and passionately aesthetic sensibility, managing to bring alive a century through 3 lifetimes of love, joy, death, tragedy and humour in one play. Announcing herself as an incredible talent amongst an equally impressive cast. Leaving the Civic Theatre audience puffy eyed and anxious to see what D'Girlos give us next.

A Recurrence by Sophie O’Toole and Trudy Nolan, presented by D’Girlos Theatre company in association with The Civic Tallaght and part of Dublin Fringe Festival, runs at The Civic Tallaght, Parthalán Place, until September 13th.

For more information visit Dublin Fringe Festival 2026