The Second Woman review: Eileen Walsh's 24-hour performance reveals something astonishing about us

Irish Times

11 hours ago

The Second Woman
Cork Opera House
★★★★★
I go into Cork Opera House to see The Second Woman braced for a punishing experience. The premise is that
Eileen Walsh
performs the same break-up scene on a loop for 24 hours, with 100 different men, mostly nonactors selected through a public call-out. They've read the script but haven't rehearsed it.
This might suggest the play is trying to say that our entrapment in gendered roles protects us from the frightening – and potentially redemptive – experience of real intimacy. That we cast others in tired romantic scripts, re-enacting familiar patterns that obscure our ability to truly see one another. Fear of love disguised as its performance.
[
Eileen Walsh: Women actors 'are like avocados. You're nearly ready, nearly ready - then you're ripe, then you've gone off'
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]
Or perhaps it's making a broader point, not just about gender but about the compulsions of private suffering: how we return, again and again, to the primal scene of our own hurt, condemned to repeat it without ever resolving or transcending it.
In short, I expect something boring and depressing. Endurance theatre may be admirable, but it's rarely much fun.
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Happily, I am wrong.
To begin with, The Second Woman, which is being staged as part of
Cork Midsummer Festival
, is incredibly stylish. Onstage is a glowing pink box with gauze walls, inside which sits a brightly lit livingroom with a neon sign and vintage wooden furniture. Walsh enters pushing a trolley of whiskey bottles and glasses. She's in a red dress and strappy heels, her hair platinum-blond and voluminous in a very Hollywood way.
The whole aesthetic nods to
John Cassavetes
' Opening Night – the source of the script – but also evokes films such as Paris, Texas and Mulholland Drive.
More than any one film, though, it recalls the voyeurism of early reality dating shows such as Love Connection, where private loves and humiliations were first made public. A camera crew circles the gauze box, filming close-ups projected live on to a large screen, amplifying the cinematic, self-aware atmosphere.
The Second Woman: Eileen Walsh during her 24-hour theatrical marathon. Photograph: Jed Niezgoda
The Second Woman: Eileen Walsh during her 24-hour theatrical marathon. Photograph: Jed Niezgoda
The Second Woman: Eileen Walsh during her 24-hour theatrical marathon. Photograph: Jed Niezgoda
The structure of the piece, which is directed by its creators, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, is simple: Walsh waits while melancholic piano music plays. A man arrives with takeaway. They share noodles, a drink, a song, a dance, and break up. He leaves, saying either 'I love you' or 'I never loved you.' The piano starts again. The scene resets.
Far from being a bleak comment on the replaceability of romantic partners, what emerges is the astonishing range of human difference. The fixed script throws each man's interpretation into relief. Some play it angry, others earnest. The funniest ones go meta: 'Are we really doing this again?' Some guys are so sexy: tender and knowing and playful. Some guys are just assholes, spilling their noodles. Such is life.
What truly shines is Walsh's intelligence, responsiveness and flexibility. She's up for anything, alive to each variation. She can switch from mischief to abjection in a blink.
Repetition, counterintuitively, deepens. Attend to anything closely enough and it opens like a flower to the light. As
John Cage
said, 'If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If it's still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.'