A tough look at a broken life

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Lowry, Salford, to Saturday

THE title fully reflects the experience and the original, best-selling experimental novel on which it was based.

The unnamed girl in the award-winning stage version of the book, played in a bravura fit of memory and emotional honesty by originating actress Aoife Duffin, is half the woman she might have been if her family and upbringing had been anything approaching normality.

The broken character is seen growing literally from the womb to her twenties in unspecified locations alongside a slightly older brother, who is dying inexorably from brain cancer, a truth that casts a dark shadow over both their lives.

If this wasn’t enough, there’s her devout Catholic mother, the lack of a father, sexual abuse by her uncle, and a distorted view of sex that sees her offer it to her schoofriends through her teens and suffer the indignity of rape on the day of her brother’s wake.

This is not easy material, and even after dozens of performances Duffin is clearly affected by the experience of her extraordinary performance.

The audience doesn’t get off easily either. The girl’s mind is fragile and fractured, and Eimear McBride’s novel was written accordingly, its sentences half-finished and often making no sense, like the thoughts of an unsettled mind.

Annie Ryan’s adaptation follows the style closely, and the result is sometimes horrible to listen to (Duffin performs alone for 90 unbroken minutes). She jumps between the girl, her brother, the mother, the uncle, friends and passers-by without warning and is occasionally difficult to follow.

Her descriptions can be graphic, the emotions accompanying them unpleasantly cold, and the picture is of a young woman whose life is in drastic need of intervention. Sadly the ending is a perhaps tragically expected one: she walks into a lake and doesn’t walk out.

But while this is a fairly unremittingly bleak evening, it remains also rather beautiful in its simplicity and emotional trauma — and while the way out seems predestined, that doesn’t make it any easier to watch when it comes.