Venue: Bewley’s Café Theatre
Date: Saturday, 19 September 2026
Reviewed by: Áine Bee @ainebeee
Edited by: Kaitlyn Smith
Rating: ★★★★★ 5/5

Sophia Wren looks so sweet, so genuine. Almost wholesome.

In 2024, I had read the rave reviews from Dublin Fringe Festival but had never seen Wren herself. Was I the right age demographic? Would I understand the gags?

Sophia Wren: show me the funny.

According to Wren, her favourite audience members are thirty-something and female. Everyone else? Forget it. Potential paedos.

The room is decidedly female, save for the sweaty older man beside me. Wren bypasses him, interrogating poor Kaitlyn from the US on whether she’s a paedo. Kaitlyn survives. My neighbour remains mysteriously unvetted.

The crowd, hands on white-wine glasses and bottles, cheer and hug in anticipation. I have no drink and snuggle up to what I think will be a sugary-sweet, girly-girl event.

And we’re off: shadow puppetry, bag-a-cans, drinks for the audience, witchy women, thrush, suppositories, smears, hens, brunch, Irish mammies and the ‘sexy toddler’ aesthetic, delivered at such speed that I occasionally find myself three jokes behind.

She machine-guns jokes out, so her Trini-titty College degree did not go to waste. Good girl, Wren. You’re a very, very good girl.

Wren knows her demographic. Turns out, I might not be it, but I like it.

Her language is gorgeously filthy. My innocence around The Sound of Music and Captain von Trapp will never be regained. My God, Wren. So much for wholesome men.

Yet beneath the twerking, vaginas and prosecco, something darker emerges: a deep-seated hatred of a girl called Siobhan.

The attention-seeking child who wanted to be called ‘The Best Girl in the World’ grows into a teenager, theatre kid and young woman who leaves Ireland for a man. Wren’s diary readings take her back into her past, and a tale of an abusive relationship suddenly becomes frightening.

The lights dim, and the room follows.

Then she pulls the rug out from under us. The attention-seeking cow has been playing with us all along. Now we feel sorry for Siobhan.

I laughed like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas, coughing and spluttering. I’d arrived wondering whether I was her demographic; by the end, I felt like one of Wren’s girls: poo rolled in glitter.

And after all those coins are inserted, eventually the prize drops: we discover who ‘The Best Girl in the World’ really is.

Who?

You’ll have to see Wren’s show to find out.

I scurried out behind the aforementioned sweaty man and into a hot-and-heavy nightclub crowd, the same music that had occasionally billowed upstairs into Wren’s set.

After an hour inside Sophia Wren’s head, Dublin suddenly seemed remarkably quiet and boring.