Our New Girl review: Sexism satire meets psychological thriller in Nancy Harris’s outstanding play

A nanny arrives out of the blue, to help a woman with her troubled son, in Nancy Harris's psychological thriller. Photo: Ros Kavanagh

Gate Theatre, Dublin

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

“He wears you down,” says Hazel, the mother of a young child in the Gate Theatre’s play Our New Girl. Responding to the latest crisis involving her son, her life seems to be sliding into somewhere increasingly unknowable and impossible to prepare for. Has Nancy Harris, through the distorting effects of psychological thriller, found a perfect metaphor for motherhood? 

There’s some pith in the idea, as the complexities of the mother-son relationship play out. But this is a particularly creepy kid. Daniel, played by a compellingly blank James Lonergan, has a fascination with plastic surgery. He makes classmates uncomfortable by staring at them. And he keeps an unknown poisonous animal in a shoebox in his room.

You might see why Hazel’s husband Richard, a surgeon working overseas in disaster relief, has arranged for the arrival of a nanny, albeit behind Hazel’s back. In her breakout performance as Annie, the terrific Bláithín Mac Gabhann is bright, warm, with a smile just wide enough to vaguely belong in a horror play. “Kids always respond to routine,” she says, recording Daniel’s varying bedtimes in a notebook. It’s difficult to know whether she’s there to help or to carry out an inspection. 

Such ambiguities are ratcheted up by director Annabelle Comyn’s excellent production, which finds intoxicatingly dark visuals. Under Aedín Cosgrove’s lighting, the ordinary home blinks occasionally into a shadowy otherworld. Philip Stewart’s music unnerves in its shifting time signatures. You can’t take your eyes off the stage. 

There was a period in the early 2010s when Catherine Walker seemed to be playing roles too stealthy for an actor better suited to stylisation. Here the demands are very much in her wheelhouse, her performance technical yet sincere, as Hazel gets pulled further into a nightmare. Seeing Richard (Aidan McArdle) return and strike up a friendly bond with Annie, just as Daniel’s behaviour grows more worrying, gives her much to fear.

The script works Hazel’s unease and insecurity into an outstanding satire about sexism. As Richard and Annie align themselves against her, making deceptive allegations that her parenting is corrupting her child, it becomes a disturbing act of manipulation. This is the play's main concern: how motherhood is easily gaslit into overwhelming guilt and shame.

So satisfying is the conclusion, it’s difficult not to walk away and think of Harris’s exciting collaboration with the Gate, a partnership that has yielded two other interesting plays, The Red Shoes and The Beacon. In the past, the theatre relieved its output of classical plays by allying itself with contemporary playwrights. There was Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter in the 1980s and 1990s. Brian Friel in the 2000s. It seems Harris may live happily in the same paragraph. 

Runs until Mar 21st.