The Dublin Theatre Festival Review: Poor
By Ross
It’s hard to describe the special kind of energy that surges through my body as I make my way to my first show at the Dublin Theatre Festival. It was my second time in the city, but the first time at the famed Gate Theatre, and I couldn’t wait to make my way in. There’s a certain dynamic fusion of history, artistry, and personal/professional anticipation at the theatre and within the festival. A theatrical energy that is contagious and thrilling with its intimate grandeur and storied walls. It’s as if the ghosts of Irish theatre are leaning in to listen right beside me.
Sitting in the celebrated Gate Theatre for Poor, a new play adapted by Sonya Kelly (The Wheelchair on My Face) from Katriona O’Sullivan’s acclaimed autobiographical book, I couldn’t help but feel that particular Dublin current of excitement escalating within the room — one of theatrical empathy, enlightenment, and truthful storytelling. Oddly enough, earlier in the day, I’d wandered through Trinity College, which takes on its own kind of role within this captivating play. Within its special kind of grandeur, the place of higher learning ultimately became O’Sullivan’s academic home, and her place of rescue. Seeing it just hours before gave the entire play a powerful personal resonance and reality. I was walking, quite literally, through the world she had to fight to enter, and I could feel that energy in the air of the Gate.
Directed sharply and tightly by Róisín McBrinn (Gate’s Fun Home), Poor unwraps O’Sullivan’s tale of chaos and abuse, where somehow she survived all that sadness and despair. It was a childhood and early adulthood overwhelmed by addiction, neglect, and poverty — not just as circumstances, but as destructive systems that hungrily feed on shame and repetition. Through a captivating blend of direct 4th wall-breaking address, vivid re-enactment, and raw car-trip confessional storytelling against a backdrop of doors designed by Aedín Cosgrove (Gate’s Medea), the play expertly exposes not only the endless pit of deprivation but also the inner mechanisms that keep it pulling and tugging one down.
Addiction, thankfully, is portrayed not as an abject moral failure, but as an inheritance, a learned way of numbing pain when no one teaches you another way or language. The play’s structure, by listing chapter and page numbers, mirrors that pattern, circling back, folding in on itself, before expanding outward with a hard-earned clarity that never feels easy or redemptive, but honest and insightful.
Watching and witnessing this story of forgiveness and mercy, marked by Portia’s epic speech from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, I was struck by how well Poor depicts the moment of connection within therapy, when that fragile, tentative wide bridge between defensiveness and trust grows smaller and smaller. The scene in which O’Sullivan finally sits across from her first therapist is epic and unforgettable. The hesitancy, the testing of boundaries, and the tiny shuffle closer and closer to her therapist are pure gestures of bravery, not performance. Trust, the play reminds us, is an embodied act long before it becomes an emotional one. The therapist doesn’t “save” her; instead, she offers space, patience, and presence, a framing this psychotherapist can relate to, where the invisible architecture of healing that most people never get to see is literally rolled out before us, speaking volumes quietly. And subtly.
Wired inside self-sabotage and rage, the performances by all in Poor are outstanding. Aisling O’Mara (Bewley’s Cafe Theatre’s Next Please), playing O’Sullivan as an adult, steadily anchors the play with an engaging intensity and sharp sense of humour, moving slyly between narrator and participant with seamless emotional precision. “She’s me when I’m younger”, she tells us, motioning to the embodiment of her younger self, portrayed with heartbreaking vibrancy by Pippa Owens (Gaiety’s Diamonds Are Forever), who steadfastly carries both the rage and vulnerability of a child learning the rules of pain. The actors playing her parents bring a devastating complexity — flawed, damaged, occasionally tender — without ever slipping into caricature. And the ensemble, moving fluidly through multiple roles, creates the texture of a world both suffocating and strangely alive. Together, they embody the full weight of O’Sullivan’s past, while also charting her emergence from it.
Backed by the always emotionally present shadow of her ‘Uncle’ Bob, we watch a woman struggling against the impossible to find the voice that others keep telling her she has. What stays with me most, though, is the play’s purposeful compassion — not just for O’Sullivan, but for everyone trapped in systems that deny them dignity and agency. Her mother (Hilda Fay) and father (Aidan Kelly) struggle inside a web of conflicted love and intense addiction, with drugs usually the winning opponent. Matched by the uneasy silences of those who wish they could do more, those magnificent teachers who continually offer slivers of light refuse to take no as an answer. These moments accumulate like fragments of care and grace. The play doesn’t smooth over these complex contradictions; instead, it honours them. That’s where its beauty lies. It knows that love and anger can coexist, that poverty is as much psychological as it is material, and that climbing out of either requires both rage and tenderness.
When O’Sullivan’s path finally, eventually, leads her to and through the halls of Trinity College, capping it all with a PhD and a book, Poor elevates itself into something larger than a simple staging of an autobiography. It’s a call for empathy, for reimagining what support looks like, and for recognizing that recovery is not a straight line but a spiral, up and down, through the dark shadows, and winding slowly toward enlightenment and forgiveness. Staying balanced on the beam, Poor doesn’t preach or plead. It simply stands there — trembling, brave, alive — and asks us to see, and to care.
