‘To me, aged 7. I’ve got you.” Katriona O’Sullivan’s dedication of her bestselling memoir to her younger self is the emotional core of Sonya Kelly’s new stage adaptation. The remarkable story of the author and psychology professor who grew up in poverty in Coventry and Birmingham, her childhood blighted by drug addiction and sexual abuse, is split between the child (Holly Lawlor) and adult (Aisling O’Mara) Katriona, as joint narrators.
With Katriona’s parents (Aidan Kelly and Hilda Fay) breaking into song on a car journey, the early scenes in Róisín McBrinn’s production shift uneasily in tone, as if the older Katrina, looking back, is determined to be upbeat and to keep the utter misery of her parents’ circumstances at a distance. The structure – an episodic, linear narrative – creates some distance too, with frequent references to the autobiography’s page numbers adding to the sense that the book is the blueprint for the play, rather than a starting point for Kelly’s dramatisation.
