Woman Undone review: A reimagining of Mary Coughlan's life, ethereal and terrifying like a nightmare

The singer watches her younger self suffer predatory attacks and downspins through addiction, in this avant-garde play. Photo: Simone Rudolphi

Project Arts Centre, Dublin
Nov 17-24

★ ★ ★


“This is the root of your anger,” a girl is told halfway through Woman Undone, Brokentalkers’ new avant-garde play. The clarifying tone of Mary Coughlan, talking to a younger version of herself moments before a harrowing attack, rings with the understanding of a woman’s chaotic youth. 

It’s telling that one of the first images we see in this reimagining of Coughlan’s life, written by the singer and directors Feidlim Cannon and Gary Keegan, is that of a serious road accident. Details of physical injury, written in strangely lush choral music by Valgeir Sigurðsson, read like a specific incident. But when her alter ego (the dancer Erin O’Reilly) emerges from that smoking car wreckage in Sabine Dargent’s extraordinary set, it’s clear that this is a life born out of trauma. 

Coughlan looks on as her younger self is censured by male authorities, played by the superb singers of folk band Mongoose. A stoic father in soldier’s uniform (Molly O’Mahony) is digging what seems like a grave. A priest (Muireann Ní Cheannabháin) warns against impurity. A grubby man dressed as a cowboy (Ailbhe Dunn) blows a glittering stream of bubbles, in a haunting depiction of sexual assault. 

The production, ethereal and terrifying like a nightmare, seeks to make recognisable violence appear new. When Jack Phelan’s sublime video design projects Coughlan’s face against a sheet of corrugated metal, she is uncannily familiar yet strange. In Eddie Kay’s movement direction, O’Reilly is put through predatory attacks and downspins through addiction, as Sigurðsson’s music braids harmonies into an elegant drone. Coughlan is consolatory and implicated in equal measure, trying to reassure her younger self one moment, and handing her a bottle of vodka the next. We’re constantly dazed by contradicting beauty and horror. 

That suffering risks becoming inert and striking like a sculptural object if it isn’t redirected somewhere. Later, Coughlan is given her usual sound, bluesy guitars and keyboards, suggesting that a fraught life may find an escape through music, but the lyrics remain shackled to the past. Her story may be abstracted into something universal. When asked about her absent mother, Coughlan replies: “She was just like me”, as if trapped in a cycle of brutality against women.  

But the production hasn’t figured out how to transform pain into survival, even if its final song tries to convince otherwise. Woman Undone is a play unfinished.