Underneath by Pat Kinevane (Ireland)

Sticks and stones didn’t break Her bones, but words and pointing crushed Her.

In this extraordinary piece of one-man theatre, celebrated Irish writer and actor Pat Kinevane delves deeper into the question of beauty - underneath the skin, underneath society, underneath our perceptions. Kinevane asks the penetrating questions: Is beauty really only skin-deep? Can we trust it? Does ugliness hide somewhere deeper?

This stunning new play is a blackly comic, rich and vivid tale of lives lived in secret, a testament to people living on the fringes of everyday life. Kinevane’s intensely physical performance shows him to be both a nimble and magnetic presence. As storyteller, he favours an arrestingly disjointed approach; as performer he combines the exotic and the earthy; and as political dramatist, he gravitates towards the marginalised, while always celebrating great humanity and humor in his tales.