Edinburgh Fringe 2025
This SH*T happens all the time
Amanda Verlaque, Rhiann Jeffrey, performed by Catriona McFeely
Genre: Biographical Drama, LGBT Theatre, One Person Show
Venue: Assembly
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A true story about queer love, tummy flips, and hearts skipping beats. A stunning one woman show with a riveting actress and an important message.
Review
This SH*T happens all the time
On a completely bare stage in one of those tiny black clad stuffy boxes, we are greeted by a young woman, Catriona McFeely, wearing blue jean dungarees, white plimsols and a tight short sleeved T-shirt. Her hair is in a ponytail. She says hi, asks where we’re from, puts us at our ease and as the lights change she casually announces: “I’m going to tell you a story.”
The year is 1985, Madonna is in the charts, Catriona country on a burst into song, (what a voice!!) setting the scene and then she is her, Amanda, telling, no, showing us what her life was like at age 15. Knowing you’re a very well hidden lesbian, flushing as you feel you are being told off in church. We are in catholic Belfast, queers are ridiculed and bullied in school, flirted with in private and then sneered at in front of the other students.
We follow Amanda to university where she makes a cocky and confident female friend from Dublin who interrogates the innocent girl’s sex life and challenges her to be braver, to ‘light her lesbian headlights’. Amanda falls madly in love with an older student who strings her along and eventually seduces her. Smitten and finally ‘seen’ our heroine is on cloud nine until … and it gets scary. This is Belfast in the ’90s after all. A vulnerable young woman with too much imagination experiences her first and quite terrifying heartbreak.
Catriona performs all this with no props, no furniture, no voice overs. All we see and hear is her, though I could swear I met at least seven other characters in this hour. Her body language, voice and accents are riveting and spot on. She smokes innumerable invisible cigarettes while having a full-on conversation with herself, well with her best friend. She sneers and grabs her crotch in a threatening manner as the mean bloke from Shankill who jealously wants her girlfriend for his own. At one point she’s a whole gang of bullies.
It is simply beautiful to watch this actor. Her strength never fades. Director Rhiann Jeffrey has led Catriona with a confident hand through the many twists and turns of this story. The author, Amanda Verlaque is present. I’m glad she survived her ordeal and pulled herself through. Even though this all happened 35 years ago and we seem to live in more enlightened times now, no kidding. This shit still happens all the time. As two young lesbian women in the audience commented afterwards, it depends very much on where you live.
