Iphigenia in Splott
Inis Nua Theatre Company
302 S Hicks St.
Philadelphia
March 30, 2025
Most solo theater follows the same script: Only one perspective is told; the fourth wall tends to break; the individual is used to make a point about the universal. It’s often autobiographical.
The play Iphigenia in Splott is a one-woman show that ran last week at Inis Nua Theatre Company, a company dedicated to the production of contemporary provocative plays from Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales. Its script tells a fictional coming-of-age tale about a young woman named Effie who lives in Splott, a neighborhood in Cardiff. Though not autobiographical, the story feels real — but, unlike great solo theater, the piece fails to prompt introspection.
Effie is a raunchy and raw party girl. Her relationship to alcohol is tumultuous and she exerts her excess energy in bouts of aggression. From the first seconds of the play, we see her disdain for people’s opinions of her. “I know what you think of me,” she says in a brief opening monologue, following the statement with a middle finger to the audience.
The actress who played Effie, Campbell O’Hare, made the story feel entirely embodied and true-to-life. It is very difficult to capture an audience’s attention so raptly for 85 minutes with no intermission. She filled the space with uninhibited truth and unembellished grit.
Though O’Hare is a Philadelphian actress, Iphigenia in Splott was penned by Welsh playwright Gary Owen. By the end of the show, I was convinced that O’Hare had been tasked with imbuing depth into a superficial character.
The story follows Effie’s journey as she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after a one-night stand. She decides to keep the child but ends up giving birth prematurely. Her baby dies in the ambulance as they are being transferred. Effie has the option to pursue compensation for the mishandling of her birth but turns it down after a nurse convinces her that doing so would mean less funding to care for other patients.
Effie’s refrain throughout is the mantra, “I can take it.” She says this when describing how people treat her; the unhealed wounds of the man she sleeps with; her choice to swallow her anger when she discovers that the same man has a wife and daughter; her decision to drop her medical malpractice case. Her choice to “take it” is ultimately framed as cultural reality, and by the end of the show, Effie pluralizes her own line: “We can take it cause we're tough, the lot of us … what’s going to happen when we can’t take it anymore?”
Though the message of unity was exciting given the globally important subjects studied by this story — like sex, prejudicial healthcare and class — the leap from personal to universal was not easy to make. A personal story becomes universal when the audience is prompted to look inwards in alignment with the characters' own revelations. The play seeks to make one woman’s story that of many, but Effie never forms any kind of connection to other people or the world that could inform her own self-realization, despite the intended profundity of her final lines.
An issue I took with the play was the character of “fat mum.” That’s how Effie refers to a mother who she repeatedly observes with her children while in the hospital and on the streets. I found the language used to describe the family unnecessarily cruel. The child is described as a dog, “pudgy all rolls,” and the mum is referred to with increasing disgust each time we encounter her, seen with “greasy sludge in her pores.” Effie describes how the room breathes a sigh of relief when “fat mum” leaves the doctor’s office.
There was a missed connection between how Effie judges others and how she assumes others judge her. The writer does not give Effie the chance to confront her own inherited judgements. This is likely the difference between an autobiographical piece, which inherently requires self-reflection, and a story constructed by an outsider unfamiliar with the internal psychology of their subject.
There’s nothing wrong with an unchanging character, but there’s disappointment in the false framing of an unresolved character arch. Though we watch Effie hit hard lows, she’s never fully vulnerable with the audience; we feel close to the character because of O’Hare’s dynamic performance, but Effie remains unrelatable due to her lack of self-examination.
For all its honesty, the play falls short on the most difficult and necessary action any of us can take: A look in the mirror.
