The Irish diaspora in London were out in force for Emma Doran’s appearance at Leicester Square Theatre. Her online work and her appearance on Amazon Prime Video's LOL: Last One Laughing Ireland has gained her a huge fanbase in Ireland and beyond – although she did ask if the English in the room had been dragged along by an Irish pal. In truth, they were probably fans anyway – and would surely have been at the gig’s end.
Doran is energetic and warm-hearted, but there’s a steeliness about her, too, and occasionally some of her very frank material pushes the envelope, taste-wise. Mostly Emmaculate is about growing up in a working-class family in Dublin, and her domestic life there now as a mother to a blended family of three children.
Her memories of childhood can turn from the sentimental – she calls the pack of 10 cigarettes she used to buy as the “little kids’ box” – to the shocking in a beat as she describes her encounters with the local flasher. It was, she says, a different era, and not for the first time in the evening – as when she describes a mental health episode some years ago – I would have liked a deeper dive into the material.
Her descriptions of Irish mammies could be hack, but Doran talks with affection about how the greatest compliment one mother could pay another was to describe her home or children as “immaculate”. But no immaculate conception for Doran, who was a teenage mum. Now a mother to teenagers herself, she talks with wonder that she has produced three “geeks”.
Along the way, Doran talks about the menopause – “They only invented it about five years ago” – the time she mistakenly bought rollerskates, misunderstanding what a PhD is, and her nemesis on a school parents’ WhatApp group.
The show, while entertaining, is unevenly paced, but Doran ends it with a lengthy description of the time she judged the end-of-year talent show at her sons’ secondary school. It’s funny and touching by turns, and the unexpected payoff is a doozy.
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