paywall – The King’s Arms
This was my first trip to The King’s Arms, and this 54-seat black-box venue, nestled in the historic heart of Salford, felt like the perfect setting for this one-woman show, performed as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe.
Written and performed by Neysa Killeen, a self-styled Irish storyteller, the play begins in medias res with Lizzie, a 27-year-old woman, making the difficult decision to leave her Dublin flat and return home to the unwelcoming arms of her father. Defeated in her quest to become a hard-hitting investigative journalist by a combination of the stitched-up patriarchy and the cost-of-living crisis, Lizzie’s story charts her personal journey from a small child dubbed ‘cold’ by her aunt on the day of her mother’s funeral to a wrung-out postgraduate struggling to pay h...