An Audience with Dolly Alderton: Agony aunt has zippy line in posh swearing – but it’s not her who gets biggest laughs

An Audience With Dolly Alderton

Vicar Street, Dublin

★★★☆☆

Because I know how to have a good time, I spend 15 minutes counting the audience into the auditorium for An Evening with Dolly Alderton. I get to 147 without seeing a single male attendee.

A man does submit a question in the second half. I see one fellow in the bar. But it remains hard to think of any other theatrical event that would be so single-sexed. I know women who endure Jeremy Clarkson. Ariana Grande has a sizeable gay following. You would encounter more testosterone at a nail bar.

Anyway, it is always good to get a perspective from outside the core audience. The journalist, author, podcaster and agony aunt, perhaps still best known for the spiky memoir Everything I Know About Love, enters loudly to the strains of Robbie Williams’s Let Me Entertain You. The plea falls on willing ears. As they settle down to cheers, she and her interlocutor, comparing glam outfits, joke that they are not “booky” people. The format does, however, satisfy the conventions of a formal literary event.

Alderton has a tome to flog. Good Material, the follow-up to Ghosts, her first novel, concerns a floundering (male!) comedian dealing badly with everyday traumas in a distant suburb of London. Never straying far from the text, the opening chat sees the wittiest, most aggressively personable of young novelists play the audience like a taut bodhrán.

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That writer is Caroline O’Donoghue.

It implies no disrespect to Alderton, a former public-school girl with a zippy line in posh swearing, to relay that the Cork writer, author of Promising Young Women, gets the biggest laughs as she teases out lessons from Good Material. Her comic exasperation at the men who forgive Walter White, from Breaking Bad, for selling meth to children as they chastise his wife for “getting at him” speaks volumes about the differing standards applied to fictional characters.

Along the way they touch on a hugely hostile review of Ghosts that was all over social media on publication. “I had a bad review that went viral,” Alderton explains. “The worst review I think I’ll ever have in my life for my last book – and I’ve never commented on it publicly.” Here we must tread carefully. They do not identify the source, but a pan from this newspaper did indeed go properly viral in 2020. Alderton speaks touchingly about how the notice landed as she was going through a terrible break-up. But she survived in characteristic form, taking time in a posh hotel with O’Donoghue. “We had the best time. I sat in a Jacuzzi drinking champagne for such a long time I gave myself cystitis,” Alderton laughs.

[ Dolly Alderton: ‘I was reckless, I took too many risks’ ]

Moving on to a Q&A, the evening melds that blend of salty wisdom with cocktail-bar irreverence throughout. The dynamic is that of a high-end podcast, enlivened by an enormously warm audience that curls around the subjects like a comforting embrace. Somehow or other, Michael Winner creeps into the conversation. “He’s an old theatre director, isn’t he?” Alderton wonders. I just about manage not to mutter, “No, not really”.

The other guy and I greatly enjoy ourselves.