Seems that the childless, unmarried woman of a certain age was always a bit threatening, like a loose social wheel, undefined and unrestrained by the reassuring moulds of marriage and motherhood. What’s it like in 2015 to inhabit this nexus of inherited social anxieties? Well if you’re Geraldine Quinn, sometimes it’s an absolute crack up. 

MDMA: Modern Day Maiden Aunt, directed by Justin Hamilton, is a lurid wrestle with contemporary definitions of the single fortyish childless woman. Quinn is impatient with the smug, couple-normative assumptions of married people, contemptuous of the caricatured labels of MILF and cougar, and weirded out by those besotted parents who post constant facebook statuses about their child’s every move. She rails against marginalisation as the ‘invisible woman’, and she’s perhaps just a tiny bit anxious about the future threatened by her father when he tries to persuade her to go into teaching for job security (“It’s hard to look after a single aunt”).

Although there appear to be some initial cueing gaffs with the sound guy, Quinn teasingly integrates them into a running joke with him between songs. Her voice is stunning and she’s dressed to match: satiny cabaret diva, complete with yellow stockings and rooster feathers in her orange hair. The show sashays with corresponding flamboyance through a tumble of potty-mouthed musical interludes.

Her opening song is a sharply witty run-down of all the cringe-making conversations typically suffered by the ‘maiden aunt’ in the family, riffing on the old anxious refrains about spinsterhood that go back to Jane Austen – admittedly reminiscent of Bridget Jones’ lament of the chronic singleton, for instance, but without the woe-is-me-I’m-incomplete-without-a-man subtext.

She roars at the ‘cougar’ fantasy that thirty-something women can’t get laid – “I assure you they do /And it will never be with someone as shitful as you!”  She manages to milk the comedic value of social media throughout two songs, culminating in the heartfelt admonishment to her niece “Don’t Put Your Vag on the Net’.

Under all the laughs and hyperbole, MDMA is pithy and cathartic storytelling, punching out a cultural space for the woman who is undefined by her breeding or marital status but has a shitload of love and wisdom to offer the world and to her loved ones. Fabulous.

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