Review: A Walking Shadow, EdFringe

A woman sits centre stage, knitting, as the audience take their seats. She’s wearing a shawl, a high necked white shirt and long skirt. If I’m honest, she feels like the caricature of an old Irish woman, peering out at the audience. There’s a touch of the amateur about it. The set is bare, save the chair she sits on. The stage itself is well light with two lights trained without movement on to her.

Her monologue starts, and the accent takes a while to settle. Her story is that of standard Irish folklore, banshees and the hold they have on people; villagers who are up to no good, that sort of thing. At this stage, all is fine, nothing special, but reasonably entertaining. She tells it well, and leans forward with half closed eyes at key moments in the narrative to connect with audience members. Whilst no date has been given explicitly it is reasonable to assume this is a story set some time ago, perhaps the early 1900s?

Then she stands and takes off her shawl. Her whole demeanour changes and decades fall from her face in front of our eyes. It is quite extraordinary and the energy in the room changes. Her story shifts to the personal: now it is about her. She tells of rivers of water that came out of her, of grasping pains that ripped her stomach apart, and a place where the land meets the sea. She does not know what sort of creature she is but she cannot be human. Flows as this does from her previous monologue of the Irish supernatural, and accompanied by her incessant combing of her long hair, the spectator can be forgiven for assuming she is “a woman of the fairy mound”, particularly as her vernacular is peppered with words like keening, and she shrieks and writhes around on the floor.  

This woman then sheds one more layer of clothing to stand in a long white night gown only. Her youthful demeanour has returned and she is focused. Her narration is clear and she looks the audience in the eye as she speaks. The truth is much more commonplace, and grounded in the recent history of rural Ireland and suddenly everything makes sense.  

The joy of the piece is firstly Eimear Eve Regan’s performance: the deftness by which she moves seamlessly between the world of men and that of spirits, and in doing so occupying a liminal space between worlds. The script is sublime: the ease by which the audience accepts one narrative at face value, before being wrong footed several times, but the final triumph lies in, as ever: truth. Completing the story we are faced with the horror of an historic event; one which was unspoken of for decades.

Written by: Eimear Eve Regan

A Walking Shadow plays at EdFringe until Saturday 23 August.