What's The Craic, God? - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2026

​Rebecca Donovan’s What’s the Craic, God? captures the particular claustrophobia of growing up somewhere that already seems to have decided who you should become. Donovan plays Aoife, a 17-year-old on the verge of graduating from an all-girls Catholic school in rural Ireland, desperate to escape to London. She wants to study art, build a life of her own and, above all, achieve independence. What frightens her is the possibility that staying means becoming trapped in a version of adulthood she never chose: doing something practical at college, returning home, settling for a “good enough” fella, having children and eventually looking back on the life she might have lived.

At the centre of this is Aoife’s complicated relationship with love. Her cold, distant father has left her with little understanding of what love is supposed to look like, while her mother’s avoidance of difficult conversations leaves Aoife to navigate her sexuality largely alone. Catholicism adds another layer of shame to feelings she is desperate to deny. Her first lesbian kiss is a moment of genuine bliss, but that happiness is immediately followed by panic and self-loathing, as she lashes out at the girl and calls her a “dyke” and her belief that “girls should only hold hands praying in church”.

There is something recognisable in Aoife’s voice, recalling the sharpness and chaotic energy of Derry Girls or Alan Warner’s The Sopranos, but Donovan gives her a deeper anxiety beneath the humour. Aoife is not simply trying to escape a small town. She is trying to escape the expectations attached to it. The play understands how easily “different” can become synonymous with “having notions”, and how the expectations of older generations can become inherited limitations for younger ones. For Aoife, independence is therefore about more than leaving Ireland. It is about refusing to let other people’s idea of a respectable life become her own.

That fear gives the play its emotional weight. Aoife worries that she will end up like so many people around her, spending her life “telling stories of what I nearly did”. What’s the Craic, God? becomes a coming-of-age story about having the courage to choose your own life before someone else chooses it for you. Donovan gives Aoife plenty of Catholic guilt, generational baggage and teenage chaos to wrestle with, but underneath it all is a simple, deeply human desire: to find out who she might be if she is finally allowed to become herself.

Lee Hutchison

4/5

Runs until August 31st the Gilded Balloon Patter House