★★★★✰
A one-woman show is a difficult thing to do well, so anyone considering one should pay close attention to the work of Eva O’Connor in Mustard; it is a real masterpiece. The show sees O’Connor speaking to the audience for an hour about her sex life, her struggles, her breakup and her overarching sense of despair. It is a performance that is electric with emotion.
The importance of the show’s namesake, the condiment mustard, adds a distinct kind of comic relief which sharpens O’Connor’s jokes about her love and sex lives. She treats the sauce as a kind of coping mechanism, one so important to her life and to her healing that she considers it be the only English import which should be allowed into Ireland. The faint absurdity of its importance and the strength of her feelings about it contrasts very well with the more serious dynamics explored in the monologue.
O’Connor’s enthusiastic and creative use of language ensures that the audience remains interested, but it is the raw strength of her feelings that really shines through. O’Connor can communicate distaste with a flick of her neck, or even through the movement of her eyes. She can express more hatred with her tone than most can with a paragraph. There is little wonder that this show was the winner of the Scotsman Fringe First Award 2019 or the Lustrum Award, Edinburgh 2019.
Her impressive use of similes, such as the love which “hits in the pubic bone like a train”, is just one contributing factor to the impressiveness of O’Connor’s work in Mustard. Her descriptions, for example of a sexual partner’s “naked, sinewy back”, are as evocative as any you might find in a Charles Dickens novel. She not only manages to set the scene perfectly, she invokes ideas of the human body which strike perfectly at the meeting point between love, heartbreak and lust.
O’Connor’s already sterling performance is sharpened significantly by the inventive use of lighting by lighting director Marianne Nightingale. O’Connor has a particularly expressive face, which she uses to great effect, an effect enriched by a lighting director who manages to highlight the best angles to bring her expressions to life as O’Connor cycles through grief, madness and despair.
O’Connor has a history of addressing difficult issues and doing so with aplomb. From her searing exploration of anorexia in Overshadowed to Mustard, a foray into the horrors of heartbreak, O’Connor is proving herself time and time again to be someone worth paying attention to. If you can, catch a performance of Mustard. If not, make sure not to miss her next project.
Words by Charley Weldrick
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