REVIEW: AM I IRISH YET? By Kate Kerrigan at The Claddagh Ring Pub 3 – 14 June 2024

‘It’s not an uninteresting life … but it isn’t ninety minutes of interesting’ ★ ½

Kate Kerrigan is a very successful writer of romantic fiction, mostly featuring Irish colleens in peril. Kate Kerrigan, by her own telling, was a stellar editor of teen magazines, and managed to get the Irish Tatler up and running. These signal achievements were not enough for Kate Kerrigan, so she has taken on the road a one person show that revolves around how much she would like to be Irish. Her parents were both very Irish, but Kate was born in Scotland and grew up in London, and she sounds as if she comes from Chingford which makes everyone in the Auld Country very mean to her. That she hasn’t managed to acquire an Irish accent despite living there for forty years is perhaps a pointer to the acting skills she brings to a full house in a function room in an Irish pub, the Claddagh Ring, in Hendon.

A funereally paced monologue, interspersed with episodes of mime, telling the story of her life and her achievements and her disappointments, makes for a very long ninety minutes. Not being a talented mime isn’t a crime, most people aren’t talented mimes, but then most people don’t put their mime techniques on display in front of a paying audience. It’s not an uninteresting life, and she takes some entertaining episodes from it, but it isn’t ninety minutes of interesting, and it isn’t helped by under-whelming acting chops. And it really isn’t stand-up. Really. This show should not be offered to a standard comedy audience, it should be saved for fans of Ms. Kerrigan’s novels, who might be kinder, and wish her well in her quest to be seen as a child of Éirinn.

AM I IRISH YET? By Kate Kerrigan at The Claddagh Ring Pub 3 – 14 June 2024

Tickets https://circus250.com/am-i-irish-yet/claddagh

Produced and directed by BAFTA winner Kevin Toolis

Reviewed by Chris Lilly