Felix O’Connor’s one man comedy show, Bad Girl, is one of the many stellar performances to come out of the Fringe Festival this year. O’Connor, a Dublin native and co-founder of Hysteria, a comedy collective primarily residing in Sin É, explores the nuanced experience of being a closeted transgender man in an all girls secondary school. Using a blend of comedy and more serious tones to explore his experiences, O’Connor gives one of the most hilarious, poignant, and moving performances I’ve seen in a long time.
Situated just above the ornate Bewleys Café, up three flights of stairs and through the herds of tourists pouring in from Grafton Street, you’ll find The Bewleys Café Theatre. It’s a cosy space that houses a plethora of innovative shows throughout the year. The space provided the perfect setting for this intimate show, with its small collection of tables and chairs scattered around a small stage.
Bad Girl is, in essence, a portrayal of a trans queer adolescence, and the journey of working through your own deeply repressed identity. O’Connor explores this with witty humour mixed with an incredibly powerful emotional aspect, two modes of expression he moved fluidly between throughout the show. He explores the complexities of discovering your identity in youth; his delivery is raw and genuine, staying grounded in his own personal experience throughout, allowing for an incredibly authentic portrayal of queer adolescence.
“This domineering “voice of reason” perfectly encapsulates the nuances of queer representation”
By far the most introspective aspect of his show was his use of a second offstage persona that chimed in to critique his representation of the transgender community. This domineering “voice of reason” perfectly encapsulates the nuances of queer representation, and the dichotomy between your own personal experience and the experience people want to hear. It stands to show the difficulty of wanting to represent your community in a respectful and empowering way, while also acknowledging the subtleties of each experience, and that not every queer person can be the perfect representation of every other queer person. O’Connor expressed this perfectly, shifting between humour and humble honesty.
At the end of the show, he performs a compelling duet with a YouTube clip of his younger self – the perfect tone to end the show, that inevitably had everyone wiping their eyes on the way out. Overall, this was an incredible piece of writing and performance from Felix O’Connor. He kept the audience engaged the whole time, and had everyone laughing and, by the end, crying. He’s definitely one to watch in the Dublin creative scene.
