I Want To Speak To Your Manager (How I Was Radicalised And Became…Karen) ****

They walk among us: Karens.

This is a pejorative term generally aimed at middle-aged, middle-class, women with a sense of entitlement. Holly Hughes presents I Want To Speak To Your Manager (How I Was Radicalised And Became…Karen) at Brighton Fringe after a highly successful run in Dublin. Hughes explains her slide into this world, before mounting a robust defence of it.

Hughes criticises petty entitlement in restaurants, where groups of women egg each other on, insisting on gluten-free meals when they are not coeliac. She’s above that kind of behaviour of course. That is, until she goes travelling to Australia.

Hughes is fiercely and proudly Irish, celebrating its cultural identity. So when she is served a rancid and exorbitantly priced pint of Guiness, something snaps. Her journey into assertiveness has begun.

Hughes now becomes more demanding in all aspects of her life: she pushes back against a transport fine, hounds a car rental company and has more exacting expectations in the bedroom. Empowered and in control, she has discovered a sense of agency. But does this shift sit well with her self-professed powers of empathy?

I Want To Speak To Your Manager now pivots. What had been very entertaining observational humour becomes more political and challenging, as Hughes argues that the entitled females are an extension of oppressed women through the ages. She draws parallels with Claudette Colvin, Rosa Parks and the Suffragettes.

The ambitious link between over-entitled women and civil rights activists frankly feels like a bit of a stretch, but this does not obviate her point that women continue to battle against the glass ceiling. The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s famously observed that “Well-behaved women seldom make history”.

Holly Hughes is a bold, charismatic and highly skilled performer. She engages with the audience easily with adept comic timing and natural stage presence.

Ultimately, I Want To Speak To Your Manager asks its audience to reconsider the stereotype behind the slur Karen. The over-entitled - male and female - throwing their weight around can speak for themselves. But women who refuse to remain quiet, who challenge misogyny and push back against entrenched power structures, are often dismissed. Hughes' show argues that perhaps they should wear it as a badge of resistance.