We Need to Talk Bonnets with Grainne Maguire

We Need to Talk Bonnets with Grainne Maguire

01 September, 2009
by: SpoonfedMeg

There is a slight air of desperation in the small Camden Head theatre.  Desperation of various Bennet sisters looking for a suitable husband, desperation of the Brontes trying to make a living by their pen while keeping their anonymity and the more immediate desperation of comedian Grainne Maguire who has realised that the ten-person audience won’t be growing and it’s time to start the show. 

We Need to Talk Bonnets is a comic monologue in which Maguire converts her obsession with 19th century literature and happy endings into a lens through which to view the real, and often much less happy, world. Tonight I am a sizable percentage of the lit geek audience that has come to Camden to hear Maguire’s performance running for three nights as part of the Camden Fringe.

The tiny crowd certainly fits the English studies profile: be-spectacled young women with serious looking men (or perhaps they’re just looking nervous someone is about to force them into a top hat). However with such a small group, it’s hard for Grainne Maguire to build momentum and anyone expecting a series of witty one-liners about mutual esteem and twenty thousand a year is a bit surprised by the turn her monologue takes. Maguire’s exploration of a childhood devoid of Pemberley balls and Laurie-like neighbours deteriorates into a veritable red room of adulthood with some serious real life struggles that suddenly can’t be explained by her 19th century heroines. She herself points out that her closest fictional counterpart is the unfortunate Tess of the D'Urbervilles and we all know what happened to her. Suddenly we’ve left fluffy fiction and hit the real world like a brick wall.

It’s hard to say whether or not Maguire would have benefited from a larger audience.  Although it limited the audience participation segment of her performance and meant a slow start to the show, the intimate revelations Maguire shares turns the room into a group of friends, listening to their slightly geeky and quite funny peer share her life story.  There are certainly a few misses amongst the hits of the show, including a painful segment where she imagines a 19th century comedy performance but Grainne Maguire is so charming and likable that I find myself rooting for her and quite hoping she finds her Mr. Darcy soon.

We are ushered out of the Camden Head with a WWJED bracelet (that’s ‘what would Jane Eyre do,’ of course) and the advice that, despite the fact we can’t choose the plot of the story of our own life, we can decide what genre it’s in.

Grainne Maguire is the definition of a niche comedian and her audience will always be limited to 19th century literature fanatics who attend fringe comedy shows. That said, for that audience, her show will resonate with the hope that our love of literature isn’t in vain and we all have a happy ending ahead – or at least a weighty moral to our story and a place in the national canon.

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