A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing @ Liverpool Everyman

The Corn Exchange production of Eimear McBride’s literary prize-winning novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing draws you in from the start.

A stark, existentialist setting, there are no props and only one performer, Aoife Duffin. Dressed simply in a t-shirt over a long-sleeved top and pyjama bottoms, she stands alone on a darkened stage.

In the foreword to the script, the director and adaptor of the play, Annie Ryan, states that her initial intention was ‘to present the story in some kind of abstract Beckettian landscape’. The result is a mesmerising and, in parts, upsetting piece of theatre that is charged throughout with a preternatural power. It's a relentless 80 minutes. 

Written in an intense, almost stream-of-consciousness style that recalls Joyce and Faulkner, the work relates the interior monologue of a nameless girl with a fragile psyche, set against the backdrop of a traditional and oppressive Irish Catholic upbringing. Breathing life into the poetic rhythms of McBride's text, Duffin magnificently embodies multiple characters as she presents the girl’s relationships with her beloved, terminally ill brother, her tyrannical and unsympathetic mother, and her paedophile uncle.

The play explores the impact of sexual abuse, rape and trauma on its young, vulnerable and isolated protagonist. In this respect, it is a deeply feminist work: a portrayal of confused female sexuality and a girl’s attempt to transform from a ‘half-formed thing’ to somehow find some semblance of liberation and completion.

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A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was at Liverpool Everyman 5-9 April 2016. 

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