Award-winning writer and artist Oisin McKenna brings his acclaimed one-man play Admin back to the Irish stage this January, as part of this year's First Fortnight festival, which challenges mental health stigma through creative arts.
Below, Oisin writes for Culture about a show that explores the relationship between capitalism and mental health, via 'the need to experience intimacy and solidairty in the face of fear and alienation'.
I moved to London in 2017, a year and a half after 51% of the British voting electorate opted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. That same year, the Conservative Party lost their parliamentary majority in a snap election to a surging Labour Party and confident left-wing movement, and another year later, the IPCC release a report that said we have 12 years to act to limit full on climate catastrophe.
At its core, it's a show about relationships. It's about needing to love and be loved, to feel connected to other people in big lonely cities...
In some ways, Admin is a play about all of this. It's also a play about hilarious parties, mind-numbing jobs, mediocre drag queens, and the canned goods aisle of Lidl. It's a storytelling piece about my first year in London, in which mundane detail is set against a larger political backdrop. It's about how politics influences how we feel and think - how the headlines we read every morning infiltrate our mood in subtle but persistant ways. It's also a love story. It's about the absolute thrill of finding connection in a big city where you feel don't connected to anyone and how much it can mean to find kinship when the world seems to be crumbling around you.
I'm interested in the relationship between capitalism and mental health. The public conversation about mental health that has grown in recent years is vital and important - but it's also very limited. ADMIN explores the economic and political contributors to mental health. It explores how some people don't just become depressed or anxious because the chemicals in our brain make it that way. We can become depressed or anxious because we're broke or in debt, because climate change or right-wing governments threaten our safety, or because we work in under-paid and soul-crushing jobs to live in increasingly banal cities that we can't even afford.
Admin explores all of this. But at its core, it's a show about relationships. It's about needing to love and be loved, to feel connected to other people in big lonely cities, to experience intimacy and solidairty in the face of fear and alienation. It's about being poor, precarious and lonely, and adding items to your watched list on eBay in the hopes of feeling better.
Admin is at Smock Alley Theatre from Tuesday Jan 7th - Saturday Jan 11th at 7.30pm, with a post-show discussion on Wednesday January 8th) as part of this year's First Fortnight festival - find out more here.
