This may sound unrelentingly grim, but Doherty peppers it with enlivening anachronism and plenty of black humor. The amiable pig, Padraig, has pointed opinions about Specky’s dancing and is sanguine about his fate aside from the “hook up my arse.” The slaughterhouse radio plays David Holmes’ bouncy 2023 tribute to Sinead O’Connor, Angela Davis, and other “dreamers, radicals, outcasts, icons.” The subtitles projected over the stage ask you why you’re still reading them during the big dance finale. Doherty’s blend of darkness and cheeky jokes feels very true to her homeland.

Many characters are nonstop verbal, like Specky’s twittering aunts and the chatterbox pig, but Specky himself doesn’t speak a word in the production except “Ma.” For the New York shows, which run until November 15th, the role of Specky is shared by Erin O’Reilly and Zoé Lecorgne. In the performance I saw Lecorgne excelled at dramatizing Specky through movement alone. Early on, she trembled and jerked, each shudder like the ghost of a sob. In the arms of the overbearing aunts, who dress and undress Specky like a doll, she was limply inert, telegraphing Specky’s powerlessness. Throughout, she conjured a child’s smallness and how much this one had already been ground down by life with bent knees, tight arms, and a cringing, stooped back. But when she began to dance to the radio alone in the abattoir, my heart lifted: each awkward yet exuberant whirl and slide was a burst of momentary freedom, of hard-won joy. For Specky, dance is the only channel through which he can access autonomy and express himself. I wished Doherty had given this compelling dancer even more to do.