THERE are millions of women represented in the frail yet bolshie and articulate presence of Niamh in Kat Woods’s play Killymuck. A 75-minute outpouring of spleen, it’s part teenage-diary confessional, part sociology lecture and it’s as if delivered by the coolest tutor in town.
 
The eponymous location of Woods’s play, directed by Caitriona Shoobridge, is a housing estate, reputedly built on a paupers’ graveyard in 1970s Ireland. That, claims our anti-heroine at one point, may explain the curse on the place — the houses in a row are blighted by, in turn, an alcoholic parent, a divorce and a suicide. All are “doomed.”
 
Niamh (Aoife Lennon) confidently bestrides the stage, fired up by the injustice that has landed her where she is. She has chances – school exams, teachers who rate her, an older sister heralding the joy of the grammar school place.

But she is knocked back, all too often by the actions of her own fist — the best answer to eejits when her own articulate abilities fail her. This is no easy little drama and Niamh’s reflections on her mother’s fecklessness and fear in dealing with her alcoholic, abusive husband are heartbreaking.

The moments of the “other voice,” such as when actor turns narrator and informs us that children from poorer backgrounds lose 14 points off their IQ, would seem disjointed and downright clunky in most iterations.

Here, though, Woods’s voice is insistent, as if she were taking on the audience: “You’re here, you’ve heard from the horse’s mouth why this matters and you’ll damn well stay to listen.”
 
It’s tough carrying the weight of this emotionally charged, complex monologue but Lennon pulls it off. The teenage joy of babysitting, allowing rifling of the biscuit jar, juxtaposed with the subtle appreciation of her mam’s love of planting flowers — she unveils it all and is mesmerising.
 
All credit to the direction of Shoobridge, who starts the evening with the voice of Margaret Thatcher but gives us, in the final scenes, the soaring tones of the late Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan.
 
Killymuck is a reminder that the notion of social mobility is sometimes only that — a notion. Many may well be trapped in an underclass and the pressures keeping them there are always to be blamed on the oppressor, never the oppressed.
 
Runs until April 13, box office: bunkertheatre.com.