Please Break My Heart – Dublin Fringe Festival – Review

Venue – Dublin Municipal Theatre at Smock Alley – Black Box
Duration – 55mins

Image Credit: Róisín Whitely

The play poses the question: can you really make great art if you’ve never had a broken heart? It cites various artists whose work has been shaped by the experience of loving and losing. We hear from Little Mix and their post-break-up anthem Shout Out to My Ex, and even the great Taylor Swift gets a mention on the subject. We encounter great works of literature, including those of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, as well as films featuring Marilyn Monroe and Sarah Jessica Parker. So where does that leave the solo performer at the centre of this piece, Nóra Ní Anluain Fay? Can she really be a serious artist if she’s never had her heart broken?

Nóra is a hopeless romantic. In life, we open our hearts to another person and reveal our true emotions, only to risk being hurt and let down. The problem for Nóra is that she has never experienced love, and therefore has never known what it feels like to have a broken heart.

The play fuses a variety of different art forms. We see Nóra occasionally dance and move around the small performance space, while other sequences feel closer to stand-up comedy, as she reveals increasingly embarrassing secrets about herself. There are numerous costume changes, and at one point she even constructs a boyfriend from two pool noodles and a balloon!

Her application for the reality TV show First Dates features heavily. She reads from the application, which was written late one night while she was a little inebriated, and is complete with a generous sprinkling of spelling mistakes.

There is a warmth and refreshing honesty to the whole production. The structure can feel a little haphazard at times, almost as if we are being given direct access to Nóra’s brain as she flits from one subject to another. While there is nothing particularly groundbreaking about either the central theme or some of the material presented on stage, Nóra herself is the production’s greatest asset. She comes across as warm, charismatic and entirely comfortable in front of an audience, clearly enjoying her time on stage.