Diary of a Dublin Drag Diva
Bewley’s Cafe Theatre
★★★☆☆
“I’m very private, but over the years I’ve created a monster,” Davina Devine says, with nervous laughter, in her solo show. After two decades the drag queen has reason to have her guard up: when we see her begin to type her name into a search bar, the top autofilled query is “Who is Davina Devine without make-up?”.
Unlike her peers, Davina has revealed little about who she is out of drag. That remains her business. What has changed is her desire to put a narrative on her own story.
This charming show is indebted less to the pristine monologues of Panti Bliss than to the show-and-tell of Vogue Williams and Joanne McNally’s My Therapist Ghosted Me (a show Davina toured with as opening act), deploying a slide show that depicts her childhood as an “accidental performer” in 1990s Ringsend.
Along the way there are excellent line-deliveries unafraid of awkward truths, including an impersonation of an enthusiastic music-industry representative visiting her school: “Michael Jackson is coming to town … and he wants children!” (Davina sang in a children’s choir as part of Jackson’s performance at Lansdowne Road in Dublin in 1992.)
Playwright Carys D Coburn on Bán: ‘Can we be real to one another and be family? Often the answer is no’
Change, at Dublin Fringe, is a call to climate action rooted in urgency and optimism
Dublin Fringe Festival 2025 award winners revealed
Last Gig Ever!!, at Dublin Fringe, is less performance than audience endurance test
More often there is a tendency to fluff punchlines and transitions, like a nightclub MC caught uneasily in a space where they’re expected to monologue. (See the accidental bathos of one build-up when she waits for her grandfather to come across a photo of her drag persona in a newspaper.)
There are still treasures. Rare photos of her in “baby drag” – which is to say without spray tan – will be catnip to queer scenesters. Frequenters of Dublin’s drag scene know Davina’s transformation from gladiatorial dancer to physical comedian. A superb re-creation of an old, haphazard lip-sync to Britney Spears’s Slave 4 U, performed with real python, is her at the height of her storytelling powers.
Runs at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Sunday, September 14th; then at Smock Alley Theatre on Friday, September 19th
