Amanda Verlaque’s This Sh*t Happens All The Time packs a powerful punch in its compact and compelling 65 minutes at Belfast’s Grand Opera House.
The title is pointedly germane. Set in 1990s Belfast, Verlaque’s monologue is a coming-of-age tale in a society long-scarred by sectarian division that even so found room to add misogyny and homophobia to its arsenal of stubbornly persisting antipathies.
First seen at the Lyric Theatre in a thrust setting in 2022, here it is played front-on and the effect is altogether more immediate, intimate, disconcertingly claustrophobic, and all the better for it. Rhiann Jeffrey has adroitly stripped back her direction of the earlier incarnation to cede ground to Nicky Harley’s “A Woman” in a larger portrayal than that of Caoimhe Farren’s subtly understated original.
In her bravura pre-show entry with a front of house reminder to turn off phones, Harley strikes up an immediate rapport with the audience. From there, her journey through innocence to the extreme highs of first love and the lows of the situation she finds herself in, towards a defiant independence is delivered with warmth, wit, wining brio and wisdom.
Re-lit and framed in too tightly focused cross-lighting more appropriate to dance, Harley even so commands the evening with a multifaceted, personality-filled and precise performance, as vulnerable as it is courageous. Only the hardest hearts wouldn’t want to give her a reassuring hug at its end.
Nostalgically peppered with allusions to time and place, Verlaque’s text is also salted with a rueful contemporary awareness that being considered “other” even in a Northern Ireland that claims a new dispensation towards inclusivity, is still, woefully, a dangerous identity to declare.
In that respect alone, This Sh*t Happens All The Time is a timely, trenchant tale for a society that legalised same-sex marriage only as recently as 2020 and is still struggling to reach its own maturity and accept and accommodate the plurality of identities it has always contained.
Throwing the focus on Harley’s dexterous performance, Jeffrey’s pared-back staging affords the provocative, fourth wall-breaking final line—“What are we going to do about it?”—a more resounding and demanding urgency than first time around.
Presented by the Grand Opera House as part of its commendable Studio Series showcasing new drama, This Sh*t Happens All The Time is an acutely realised exercise in soul-bearing by Verlaque. For the honesty of the writing alone, and for Harley’s performance, it is essential viewing.