The assorted children, neighbours, relatives, Gardaí, medical personnel and landladies are, sometimes literally, cardboard cut-outs.

This means that although there are six other actors, they don't get much of a look in. While Family gave equal attention to each of the Spencers, telling in turn the stories of Paula, her brutal husband Charlo and her son and daughter, the novel is Paula's perspective. Put simply, it means that the play is far closer to the novel than to the TV series. The Woman works because the same decision is made, and Hilda Fay, as Paula, carries it through with equal force. Frank Pig worked because O'Byrne built it unapologetically around David Gorry's stunning embodiment of Francie's voice. Both are utterly dominated by a first-person narrative voice that gets into your head and will not easily be dislodged. The question of what a theatrical version has to add to a character who has already been superbly dramatised is a much more open one.įor all the differences, though, the McCabe and Doyle novels have one big thing in common. The novel itself grew out of the bleakly brilliant 1994 television drama series Family, in which Paula was a central character. Paula Spencer, on the other hand, has been around the block twice before. That show was conceived in parallel with the writing of the original novel, and came well before Neil Jordan's stupendous film version. This is, though, a more difficult project than Frank Pig.

There was nothing in Irish theatre quite like Patrick McCabe's exposure of the psychotic undertow of small-town life in The Butcher Boy until McCabe and Joe O'Byrne presented their superb stage version Frank Pig Says Hello! Likewise, there has been nothing in the theatre quite like Paula Spencer's voice in Roddy Doyle's 1996 novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, until this often terrific stage version by Doyle and O'Byrne came along. Stage adaptations of novels make sense only if they fill a gap where a play should be.

The woman who walked into doors review