A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (Traverse, Edinburgh)

It must, by now, be official: there's no such thing as a happy Irish Catholic childhood. So it's not exactly news that the quietly luminous Aoife Duffin is playing an unnamed girl who is miserable at school and abused by her uncle while she tries to cope with a witch-like mother and a brother with a brain tumour.

Happy families in the Emerald Isle, is it? They're all providing a ceaseless stream of memoirs, novels and plays that we relish because it doesn't happen here ("Oh, yes it does?")… what used to be the luck of the Irish has acquired a different, harder consonant in the phrase.

Annie Ryan's production is adapted (by her) from Eimear McBride's award-winning debut novel, and it does have a certain lilt and poetry about it. There's as much prurience as filth and blasphemy in the story, as when the gym teacher teaches the girl a forward roll.

In a skirt, is it, with underwear on display, is it? Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and how is she supposed to be a Child of Mary? And when girls play at their own Mass, they have cotton buds as candelabra. The Jesus wafer is cheese and onion: this is the body of Christ, open wide and eat your crisp.

The refrains are familiar, and of diminishing potency, ever since Mary O'Malley's Once a Catholic. But with the new generation of films and plays, not to mention revelations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, these testimonies acquire a darker, deeper resonance, and Aoife Duffin – scrubbed, still, sad, defeated – takes us to the brink of despair and the point of oblivion.

Now, get on with you: who's for a bit of a hooley and a pint of the black stuff?

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing continues at the Traverse until 30 August