Larissa Brigatti catches up with the playwrights Fintan Brady and John Patrick Higgins and the director Emma Jordan ahead of Project Arts Centre opening.

Prime Cut Productions, under the artistic direction of Emma Jordan, has announced the one-man shows double bill: East Belfast Boy by Fintan Brady and John Patrick Higgins’ Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful. The Northern Irish playwrights’ works will be touring in various locations in Ireland, including the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. These plays explore male mental health in two distinguishing scenarios and performative styles which were enthrallingly well combined as they portray different phases and age groups. The plays insinuate the looming mortality of death, infused with humour and comic features which ease the accessibility. Emma Jordan, with Prime Cut Productions, has directed the internationally award-winning production of Stacey Gregg’s Scorch which highlights the difficulties and the raw reality of Kes who was accused of “gender fraud.” Similarly, this double bill was written using real people and real events as its basis of inspiration.

I had the chance to talk to Fintan Bray, John Patrick Higgins and Emma Jordan prior to the opening of the shows in the Project Arts Centre in Dublin and they shared a bit of their inspirational process of creation, motifs, and their views on the importance and relevance of this production for our contemporary audiences.

 

Fintan Brady

What inspired you to create East Belfast Boy? Do you think that other locations apart from Belfast would resonate with the text?

Inspiration… There’s a bunch of young men, young fellas across Belfast and inner city area. The geographical context of it — my sense is that it is a universal story, that these experiences in different areas, like Dublin, Cork, Roscommon would feel. (…) There is no cliche in it, it is very honest and it is funny… You’re given what this character wants you to hear because he wants your approval. I’m interested in how people respond because it is quite particular to Belfast, but it’s not specific, do you know what I mean?

I’ve seen that you spent the summer of 2015-16 with young men and it was the basis of your inspiration to write this play. What is the average age group that you were working with?

Ages between seventeen to the early twenties. Most part of it was me sitting with a bunch of lads when they were building the bonfire. On the twelfth of July, there are big bonfires all across the North in loyalist areas, they start the construction thing in June and July. And we would just have conversations about school…

And in the play, you invite the audience members to image school days?

Yeah… I’d ask them, you know, different guys, like: ‘How’s school for you?’ And this is part of a scene that is asked to the audience, to create a picture of their school.

Is the actor-audience relationship completely direct?

Part of the nature of the show, like monologues, you kinda have to, you have to talk to… the audience knows it, so you talk to them. And the question an audience member would ask is: Why is he telling me this? Why is this happening at all? And this is one of the things in the play, the character wants approval. And that’s one thing I’ve learnt with the fellas I worked with: their stories are valuable, and this is the sense I got from them that they want some encouragement to believe that anything the same has importance… The character is also a DJ so he knows the idea of working with an audience… He’s not telling everything, he tells you what he wants you to know. (…) The music was essential from the start.

 

John Patrick Higgins

In Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful you talk about male suicide and you combine this matter with humour, do you want to talk a bit about it? (…) the combination of suicide and humour…

[Laughs] I should have named it that! I think that that was a really important thing to do, actually. Because… For a number of reasons, for one thing, I mean it is a bit of humanizing it, and I wanted to make him (the character) a bit more like a human being, relatable and writable. But equally I think with depression, it’s really what the play is about, depression, isolation and lack of communication. I think that a lot of the times a person counter depression by making jokes, like dancing around the situation. You know, you might feel that it is not really allowed to talk about the situation. So, I thought it was important to make it funny, but equally, it’s a play. I wanted it to have that rollercoaster kind of thing…

It’s kind of a ‘combination of hope and despair’ kind of thing.

Yeah, it’s exactly that.

Would you like to talk about the inspirations to write this play? Was it based on like real events?

The inspiration… It came from a really horrible time that was in my life (…) and I just wanted to articulate that. I think it is very useful, I think it’s a conversation starter, you know — if you don’t want to talk about this, here’s a man who will talk about this in your place for an hour. And I really hope that people will see it and talk more about their feelings. It’ll be very useful to get communication started because there is an inability to communicate.

Do you think that the play will be accessible for different age groups and different audiences?

Well, the good thing about the double-bill is that they both deal about something interpreted in two different ways. I think anyone with sensibility would relate.

 

Emma Jordan

Why do you think these plays are important to our contemporary audiences?

Because I think that mental health is one of the biggest issues in contemporary societies, not just in Ireland but all over the world. I think male health has gone under the carpet a little bit, and specifically in the Irish context, our statistics about male suicide are horrific both in the North and South sides of the border. These are issues that I really wanted to look at, that’s what we want really: to open pathways and conversations that provoke some thought about these issues

 

Why would you put these two plays together as a double bill: East Belfast Boy and Every Day I Wake Up Hopeful?

For me it was about, statistically speaking, the cases that happen between early twenties and middle-age men, so I wanted to look at these two very different experiences, but somehow they are both linked as they are not able to articulate their emotions, or feelings, that there is no control.

 

With the aid of music and dance you have portrayed the innermost conflict of a male’s psyche. Do you think that these features helped to highlight some psychological and inner emotions?

I think that for East Belfast Boy because the character is a DJ — I mean, first and foremost, that was one of the reasons why I wanted to use music, because it is really important to that character. But I also think that it is interesting to see how physicality would mirror an emotional state of being, so the piece of writing let itself to bring that exploration.

 

Would I be right to say that it is a kind of escapism?

Yeah, I’d say so. And in the secular world that sometimes, you know, taking drugs and listening to techno has actually got a bit of a sense of spiritual element to it, so in some way it kinda replaces — and also it is a communal experience — so in a way it might replace God, in a way, in a secular kind of environment.

 

You’ve also directed Stacey Gregg’s Scorch and used music and movements. Is there a common inspiration for both Scorch and East Belfast Boy?

I think as a director, I tend to look at both physical and emotional. I think that sometimes physicality can tell a story in a more eloquent and theatrically exciting way than language can. And it adds something to the creative journey, to choreograph, it is a response to the text.  

 

The double bill is running 29 January – 20 February 2019 in Belfast, Roscommon, Cork, Letterkenny, Castlebar, Limerick, Armagh and Dublin in the Project Arts Centre (18-20 February).