“This play has become something that isn’t for us”: Working class Identity, Canonical Inheritance, and the Girlo on Stage in That’s Sooo Povo!

Authors

Ciara L. Murphy Dr, Conservatoire TU DublinFollow

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8335-0847

Abstract

That’s Sooo Povo! was first produced in 2025 as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival by D’Girlos Theatre Company. The play follows Chantelle and Croía, two working class Dublin drama students who, when faced with partnering up to perform a scene from Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926), end up summoning the “drag-drenched larger-than-life entity” Queen Povo (That’s Sooo Povo! | Fringe Festival, 2025). This companion piece firstly aims to examine how O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars has made a journey from subversive class critique to nostalgic institutional property, and what it means for working class women to encounter it not as audiences but as students assigned to perform it. Secondly, it considers how That's Sooo Povo! resists what Fiona Charlton terms the "Juno Complex" by presenting Chantelle and Croía as distinct individuals whose shared class background produces meaningfully different relationships to the same institutional structures. Finally, it analyses how the arrival of Queen Povo enacts a formal as well as political rupture, breaking the naturalistic frame of the play to assert that working class culture carries its own aesthetics, its own modes of excess and spectacle, and requires no institutional permission to be valid.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Murphy, Ciara L. Dr (2026) "“This play has become something that isn’t for us”: Working class Identity, Canonical Inheritance, and the Girlo on Stage in That’s Sooo Povo!," Irish Communication Review: Vol. 20: Iss. 1, Article 8.
Available at: https://arrow.tudublin.ie/icr/vol20/iss1/8