Sunny Side Up – unsentimental, informative and shocking insight into the world of fertility (Cheesy Grin Productions at Lyric Theatre until Saturday 20 April)

Sunny Side Up is Diona Doherty’s new show that charts a woman’s struggle to have a child. And to be clear, fertilised and healthy is how Erin would like her eggs. Before long we learn how she and wee Stevie met, how their bonktastic bedroom antics didn’t lead to an easy blue line on a pregnancy test, and how they ended up in Prague to beat the three-year wait for IVF on the NHS.

It’s a story of ups and many downs. There’s heartbreak and tragedy alongside the whimsical asides – the friend on a hen night who thought she was a potato waffle deserves a whole show of her own – and the banter about Stevie’s shortcomings.

Diona paces across a giant calendar, returning at intervals to the crucially circled ‘test day’ that reveals whether Erin’s dreams will be one step closer to fulfilment. A tree looms to one side of the page-to-a-month floor, ominous and unmentioned until after the interval when its significance will bring a tear to your eye.

Sunny Side Up could easily have been a 50-minute Edinburgh Fringe-type one-woman show with Diona leaning on a mic stand and delivering the material as pure stand up. Countless comedians have used breakups, unusual families and heartfelt situations as vehicles for belly laughs and giggles. Yet the sheer myriad of amusing characters who pop up in Erin’s life, together with Patrick J O’Reilly’s direction that makes Erin/Diona inhabit the whole calendar, the rather classy sound and lighting effects, and the insistence on an interval, all suggest that this is aiming to be something greater than just comedy.

Erin opines early on in the show – “imagine if we knew then what we know now” – and probably for most in the audience, fertility isn’t something widely spoken about. (While a consultation on adding Miscarriage Leave and Pay to Northern Ireland’s Parental Bereavement Leave and Pay legislation closed in December 2022, it’s unlikely to become law until a number of other changes to employment rights for employees and employers have been co-designed and implemented over the coming months and years.)

Sunny Side Up helpfully goes where many shows wouldn’t dare to be honest and up front about the uncomfortable conversations couples have with medical professionals and how the IVF process can mess with your mind.

Diona and husband Sean Hegarty have been very open in media interviews over the years about their own fertility journey. So this audience member found it hard to disassociate Erin and Stevie from Diona and Sean, with the hunch that much of the best material will have been autobiographical (albeit accentuated for comic effect) but never quite sure what else was just dreamt up to spin a good yarn.

Sunny Side Up is a largely unsentimental, informative and at times shocking explanation of the unspoken world of fertility treatments. Diona connects the audience with her character Erin and the spermtastic and eggstraordinary tale. It made me laugh out loud – no mean feat as John Bishop probably didn’t realise in the SSE Arena back in October 2017 when I sat unmoved while much of the audience rolled in the sizeable aisles – and it made me cry. The show continues its run at the Lyric Theatre until Saturday 20 April.

Photo credit: Rebekah Hutchinson

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