MOTHER OF GOD

Chapel Royal, Dublin Castle
★★★☆☆
Alison Spittle is holding 8.30 Mass at the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle. Madonna and Mary J Blige provide the hymns, Burger Bites and Ribena will serve as bread and wine, and the sermon will focus on how Spittle lost her faith, abandoned Catholicism for feminism, and how she never got to play Mary in the school Nativity play. Draped in a colourful cape and haloed by a crown of roses, Spittle presides over the pulpit with confidence as she rakes over her past. She tells us about the "stigma of growing up in a housing estate and the joys of rural Ireland", the attraction of religion, her embrace of student politics, her first experience at a music festival and her emergent sexuality; "the confusion of  virginity and morality". The script's diffuse focus is compensated for by Spittle's self-possession. If she could survive a weekend in a field wearing Tesco bags as trainers, she tells the memory of her school principal, she would have made a rocking Mary.

Runs as part of Dublin Fringe Festival until Friday, September 13th