Writer and performer Clare Dunne writes for Culture about her new one-woman show, Sure Look It F**k It, produced by THISISPOPBABY, which comes to Dublin's Project Arts Centre this March.
Sure Look It F**k It was an accident... Something I wrote as my party piece, purely to get the audience going when I was compering for my uncle’s 60th. It accidentally led to Emmet Kirwan asking me to do some spoken word at Body and Soul, then Willie White asking me to do an hour in the Electric Picnic's theatre tent and finally THISISPOPBABY developing it during their Where We Live Festival.
On the fly, I’ve made up a journey for it, so it grants being a piece of theatre. It’s the story of Missy, back in town after years away trying to ‘make it’, who is now the returned emigrant to Ireland. As she grapples with job interviews, inward blues and finding independence, she’s reminded that she used to fight for her buzz. It’s time to clear out her head and heart so she can start again. It’s time for Missy to repeat her old Dublin mantra and go; "SURE LOOK IT, F**K IT".
But as we approach the point of full production in Project Arts Centre, I’ve had to figure out what the f**k Sure Look It, F**k It is really about. As my friend Mikel Murfi always challenges, ‘What’s the story FOR?’
Anxiety is not an epidemic or label being thrown around for no reason. And it’s not rampant cos we’re incapable fearful eejits.
I usually think of the audience as my best litmus test. So I sat and meditated on some audience reactions: a woman at Electric Picnic nearly cried on my shoulder, saying ‘My daughter is going through this exact thing, she’s just back from America...’. Then a man in his 60s who had been in America for 30 years, said "You’ve hit a very heartfelt nerve in Irish people who emigrated for so many years, with no other options.’ A lot of young people told me they felt like it was a really cathartic journey, as they are sick of being labelled these ‘anxious millennials’ and that Missy is facing all of that - and calling it out.
Other people said it was just good craic, and they forgot their stress for an hour. A pretty broad spectrum of responses... Maybe this joke mantra can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, I mused. I realised there is a commonality to it despite age, sex, or geography… and it was: The Sure Look It, F**k It moment.
This moment is part of a cycle that most of us go through at different points in our lives. As Missy points out at the start of the show, "When your back’s at the wall and there’s no one to call and you’ve got no life guide in a booklet…" What do you do next?
Deciding what you want these days is ridiculously hard. In a western world overwhelmed with so much choice of what you can do, a world where you can google anything, where you can define a version of yourself that seems ‘perfect’ to the rest of your peers and colleagues while you sit in your room wondering how you’re going to make the rent... How do you know what YOU really want?
I’d love to meditate on the notion of maybe. Not having to define for a while? Sit back, kick back. And breathe - let your next true desire or action come from a place of truth and stillness, and not that Insta-stream or panic to achieve everything on your to-do list (or must-do list or bucket list).
So how do we get back to the baseline? And find, as Missy says at one point, the ‘stable bit of grid so we don’t flip the lid'? It could probably be a lot of things. In my story it’s a combination of letting your hair down, talking to family and friends, praying, running, questioning the universe - but whatever it is, it’s to get that more stable grounded self before moving forward.
Deciding what you want these days is ridiculously hard.
There’s plenty to be figuring out these days in Ireland and the wider world; the housing crisis, the Brexit, the mental health issues, the climate change, the poverty, the disease, the Trump... the list goes on.
Anxiety is not an epidemic or label being thrown around for no reason. And it’s not rampant cos we’re incapable fearful eejits. It’s mostly because (as recent events have shown) we can make the wrong choices sometimes and we know there’s a better way to do things... when we get the headspace to figure that out.
And maybe some stability or calm clarity harnessed in the micro could be reflected in the macro?
If we find our own 'f**k it', individually, maybe we can do it en masse, in action, together. So we don’t end up voting for things we regret and wrecking the planet trying to achieve the bucket list (well done the students last week). We have to find our own ‘stable bit of grid’, cos the grid outside of us is shifting fast and big.
And we have to fight for our truer, better buzz.
Clare Dunne's Sure Look It, Fuck It is at Project Arts Centre from 19-23 March - more details here.
