Aisling Bea talks faster than almost anyone on British television, and in most of her parts the speed is the act. In This Way Up she slowed down long enough to show what it was covering, and that is the work to judge her by.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing we notice is the pace. Bea answers a question before it is finished, drops into a voice, does the impression, deflects with a joke a dad would be proud of, and is on to the next thing before anyone can ask what the first one meant. On a panel show it reads as nerves turned into fuel. In a drama it reads as a character who would rather we laughed than looked at her, and she knows the difference.
She started small. In Come Fly with Me (2010) she plays Mary O'Mara, one of the passengers and relatives whose job is to keep a straight face while Walliams and Lucas do the talking, and she does it well. We said at the time that we wished the camera had stayed with her, and we meant it; it is an odd thing to find ourselves waiting for a reaction shot, and we were. Then came stand-up from 2011, and the panel shows that follow, and a long stretch where the voice was better known than the face. The Fall (2013) gave her Nurse Sheridan in a Belfast thriller we found cold and often frightening. It is a small dramatic part played straight, and our review did not single her out, which we do not hold against her.
The turn is This Way Up (2019–2021), which she created, wrote and leads. Aine is a woman coming back from a breakdown, and the series puts her beside a sister, played by Sharon Horgan, and lets the two of them talk over each other for half an hour at a time. Bea has said of it: "I wanted to make a show about loneliness. I felt like I didn't always see what most of it looks like." That is what the series does. The jokes are the everyday kind, and the sadness sits in the gaps between them. The double act with Horgan is the best thing she has done on screen. The weakness is the plotting, which keeps reaching for the shape of a romantic comedy when the dialogue has already gone somewhere more interesting.
Since then she has been a supporting player in other people's work: opposite Paul Rudd in Living with Yourself (2019), as Claudia Rosencrantz in Quiz (2020), as Rebecca in Love Wedding Repeat (2020). None of those parts asks for what This Way Up did. Her stand-up has the same virtue and the same cost as her acting: it never lets up, and sometimes the momentum is standing in for the substance. On the evidence so far, the parts other people write for her are smaller than the one she wrote for herself, and the next thing worth watching will be the next thing she writes.
Biography
Aisling Bea, born Aisling Clíodhnadh O'Sullivan on 16 March 1984 in Kildare, Ireland, is an Irish comedian, actress and screenwriter. She studied French and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin and trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA).
Bea began her career with small television roles from 2009 and turned to stand-up comedy in 2011. She won the So You Think You're Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2012 and the British Comedy Award for Best Female TV Comedian in 2014. She is known for creating, writing and starring in the Channel 4 series This Way Up (2019–2021), for which she received a BAFTA Breakthrough Talent award in 2020, and for her role as Nurse Sheridan in The Fall (2016). Other credits include Living with Yourself (2019) and appearances on panel shows such as Taskmaster (2017) and 8 Out of 10 Cats.
