Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks at the Royal Court Theatre

The opening line of Sarah Hanly’s debut, Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks, “I’m just very very horny. I don’t know how else to put it”, very much sets the tone of this edgy one-woman play. The female body and female sexuality are explored on-stage like never before, dissecting with stark – at times profane – frankness the forces that conspire to make women feel shame: shame about their bodies, shame about their sexuality, shame about being a woman at all. 

Performed by Hanly herself in the upstairs room of the Royal Court, the Jerwood theatre, and directed by Alice Fitzgerald, it follows the story of Saoirse Murphy who grows up in the restrictive confines of a convent school in Dublin, before moving to London to attend musical theatre college, where she makes the most of her newfound freedom – but also struggles to find her identity. Her chats with best mate Aisling help her stay sane.

Hanly’s incarnation of Murphy is nothing short of phenomenal. The 65-minute runtime plays out almost entirely like a stream of consciousness (though one knows in reality each word is carefully chosen) with barely a moment to pause for air. Her physicality is striking: at times her body is contorted, at others she bursts into Irish dance, next she’s reenacting an orgasm or climbing a mountain or performing Jack and the Beanstalk in a library. Combined with a highly original use of lighting, sound design and a Mary Poppins-esque bumbag, from which Hanly pulls a plethora of baby pink-hued props, including a string of beads and a telephone, she is able to manifest all manner of scenes in the mind’s eye of the audience, despite performing on a bare stage.

Considering its subject matter, the play is also very funny, the quick-fire rhythm of the delivery finding all the sharp edges of wit in the script as Hanly switches between characters and pitch-perfect Irish and London accents (so quick in fact, now and then one has to strain to follow the thread). However, the humour takes a turn for the dark as the play grows more disturbing; tragedy and comedy blend increasingly seamlessly, emerging as the armour Murphy uses to protect herself from despair and make the audience laugh when they might otherwise cry. In amongst the chaos, there are moments of clarity and profundity, and, underneath it all, a simmering rage.

Bearing parallels with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s original stage version of Fleabag, the play’s explicit nature shocks at first, but as it progresses, the audience realises this is part of an internalised patriarchal lens – that hearing a woman talk crudely about sex feels transgressive and taboo-breaking. In fact, delving into one woman’s psyche in visceral detail with no holds barred is where the play’s strength lies. Viewers are given unfiltered access to the thoughts, anxieties and feelings running through the mind of a woman, whether struggling with bulimia or experimenting with her sexuality, right down to when vomit backsplashes in her eye during a purge or a boy’s cum sprays into her face post that titty wank alluded to in the title.

It is worth heeding the trigger warnings: the palpable intensity is both exhilarating but also uncomfortable, at times excruciating, a sense of nightmarish claustrophobia created by being locked into Murphy’s damaging thoughts along with her. If proper art is supposed to make us feel things, whether good or bad, then Hanly’s play more than delivers.

Sarah Bradbury

Purple Snowflakes and Titty Wanks is at the Royal Court Theatre from 1^st February until 12^th February 2022. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.