A month ago, Donald Trump branded comedian Rosie O’Donnell a “threat to humanity” and threatened to revoke her US citizenship. Judging by this fringe hour, he’d be welcome to it. Common Knowledge is a hymn of praise to O’Donnell’s new home, Ireland, where she and her child Clay moved at the time of Trump’s inauguration. Clay, who is non-binary, is the other focus of the show, and of their mum’s rapturous affections, in a set that’s more a love letter to these two presences in the 63-year-old’s life than it is let-it-rip comedy.
The show is bookended by reflections on O’Donnell’s mother, whose death when our host was 10 years old is recounted in a solemn opening. Now a parent to five adopted children, motherhood is clearly a major concern of the comedian, and here we get the whole story, with a slide show, of how Clay arrived in her life. Autistic, prodigiously intelligent, fearlessly truth-telling, this is a child who dismays and instructs their mother in equal measure. That cycle supplies the show’s rhythm: we get the funny story about Clay’s behaviour, then the earnest lesson O’Donnell has derived from it.
