Wonderland Theatre ©2003-2009

Life Shop Till You Drop!

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Dublin Metro
Are you a self-help junkie? If so perhaps you could do with a little detox. This cautionary tale offers the perfect solution. Ailish McGovern (Clodagh Reid) is a girl who seems to practise more self-hindrance than self-help, and her story might ensure that you turn your back on pop psychology once and for all.

Recruitment Consultant Ailsih is 36 and single. Since the death of her father over a year ago, she has become very vulnerable. To cushion her grief she obsessively turns to self-help manuals in order to improve her life. Whether it comes to the trials of dating or tribulations of the work place, this girl has a text book to help her deal with every conceivable situation. She can barely step out the door without seeking advice from one guru or another. When she meets the man of her dreams, she goes into overdrive, manipulating situations so that he can see she's clearly the one. The consequences are disastrous.

Ailish is like a little girl lost. Behind the biting comedy, Reid portrays with great understanding a lonely woman who is struggling to come to terms with her grief. As a result no matter how ridiculous Ailsih's predicaments become, one always feels sympathy for her plight. And yet the only tears shed are ones of hilarious laughter. While there are undoubtedly touching elements to the play, the overriding tone is light and fun, thanks to Alice Coghlan's wonderfully feel-good script and Reid's ability to inhabit a number of comic characters, from Ailish's irritating boss to her chain smoking matchmaker.
By Roz Britton
Dublin Metro, 23rd January 2007
Sunday Tribune
January is an apt time to see a play about the evils of self-help books and new years resolutions. So Life Shop till you Drop, a one-woman show that casts a satirical eye over one year in the life of single thirty-something Ailish McGovern (played by Clodagh Reid), is a salutory lesson in what not to read.

McGovern has vowed 2007 will be the year she finds love, a promotion and ultimately happiness. Armed with nine of the best-selling self help books she aimshigh – to be branch manager of her recruitment agency, get married and win the Irish Tatler Woman of the Year award.

Writer and director Alice Coghlan's clever script and pitch perfect self-help jargon are a delight, colourfully illustrating how we unconsciously use these phrases in our everyday home and work life.

There are funny portrayals of desperate singletons, with Ailish coming off like a manic Bridget Jones (scary thought), taking “Me Days” off work so she can do some “motivational crying”. Amidst the laughs, Coghlan makes the more serious point that most of the advice in these self help books is rubbish – and in the case of Ailish can do more harm than good. But she’s also pointing an accusatory finger at wider society. It’s not just the pop psychologists who are to blame for young women’s unhappiness with the single life but the “singles police” too – the mothers and married siblings who put pressure on those longing to find a soul mate, not to mention the modern-day pressure society puts on women to “have it all”: husband, children, career, oh, and that Woman of the Year Award.

This is a comic satire however and there are plenty of laughs , such as when Ailish finds out the man she is seeing is married with a child. Her sister tells her, “You’re just like that book Mam got us for Christmas you’re a woman who loves too much”. Underneath the laughs though Alice Coghlan questions whether the self-help industry has helped us or whether it has actually duped us into creating neuroses that were never there in the first place, putting off the men that may otherwise have been interested in us ... and quite possibly ruining our chances of happiness.
By Edel Coffey
21st January 2007
The Irish Times
This one-hour lunchtime play, written and directed by Alice Coghlan, gets off to a neat start. A vivacious 36-year old woman in the audience leaps to her feet to receive an award – Tatler Woman of the Year. She is impelled to share her story of her success, and begins a year earlier when she identified two objectives: to get married and to get promoted.

Ailish is riddled with intellectual and verbal clichés such as ‘think in ink’ – writing them down will help us to remember her pearls of wisdom. For the matrimonial stakes she goes to a modern matchmaker, who fixes her up with dubious partners. Ailish learns that she has to kiss a lot of frogs to find her prince. On the job front, she is hired by a recruitment consultancy firm, which demands that you recruit more employees and keep doubling up to make any money. But it gives her a nice title to peddle to men at the dating agencies as she pursues her rules in shopping for life’s rewards. We follow Ailish through increasingly desperate initiatives until the play ends as it began, with a surprise.

It seems that the self-help industry is now a commercial reality, generating huge profits from the inchoate desires of people to be happy and successful. This gives the play a satirical edge, although its exaggerations are rooted in farce. Clodagh Reid plays Ailish with comic versatility, generating continuous laughter.
By Gerry Colgan
January 19th 2007
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