This is a bubbly evocation of  the chill of the Forty Foot, a homage to the ladies who swim all year round.  While some of the monologue veers towards the  purple of nostalgia,  McCann achieves some distance from cozy familiarity through a series of  narrative techniques – home movie (hand-held camera capturing the frigid plunges of  early-morning devotees, the Kish lighthouse blinking distantly);  sound-bites from authentic affionados, articulating the pleasures of momentary release from worry through icy immersion, mostly in the smooth tones of South Dublin (barring one feisty lady from Pearse Street); and a largely unvarnished conversational narrative from McCann.

She is writer, deviser, sole performer - a masochist-enthusiast, revelling in the spartan experience, finding a kind of hypothermic release that takes the swimmers out of this world, allowing them to be sea-nymphs if only for a few polar moments.
 
The New Theatre setting is unrelentingly black and bleak, counteracting McCann’s cheeriness. The cine-screen and sound-system are basic, the movement is adequately graceful, crying out for higher production values, music and choreography of the order of Bolger’s sublime dance-piece, Swimming with My Mother. The potential transcendence of simple pleasures remains for the most part earthbound by its limitations.

Derek West