As Ireland's trailblazing performance company THISISPOPBABY celebrate their 15th birthday with a new production at Dublin's Project Arts Centre, co-directors Phillip McMahon and Jennifer Jennings take RTÉ Culture on a wild trip down memory lane...
In numerology, the number 5 represents adaptability and change.
In theatre, the 5 minute call means there’s no going back!
At THISISPOPBABY, we seem to work in (fabulous) 5-year cycles.
Each cycle follows a distinct era in THISISPOPBABY’s journey, culminating in all-singing, all-dancing, bells and whistles finales.
The first 5 years is all about outrageous — sometimes sublime — ideas. Where no concept is too outlandish and no proposition too bold. If one of us said it out loud — we were doing it.
Whether it was approaching drag rock star Panti in a pub one night to propose making her first theatre show, to which she replied: "Who the f**k are you?" (and we've been close collaborators ever since); standing at Electric Picnic musing that "What this festival needs is a THISISPOPBABY venue" (It did, we did it, and it was epic); creating our own international arts festival of queer performance and ideas (Queer Notions — we still miss that one) or drunkenly screaming at the then-director of the Abbey Theatre that he was Willie Wonka, and he should promptly give us the keys to the Chocolate Factory, aka The Peacock Theatre (the pitch and the Solpadeine were both successful, and performance/art/club WERK was born). It was almost as if we were daring each other to see just how much we could conjure into existence.
in Danny and Chantelle (Still Here) in 2006
One of the more brilliant/ridiculous ideas was to make a new electropop musical, put it on at Christmas time and, riffing off a famous children’s book and an infamous seasonal carnival in Dublin, call it Alice in Funderland. We started collecting brilliant collaborators and as the idea blossomed it began to exude a kind of magic energy.
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Watch: Alice In Funderland - Somebody That I Used To Know (2013)
A work-in-progress run at Project Arts Centre was absolutely electric, and after some quite Machiavellian negotiations, we found ourselves on the main stage of the Abbey for five weeks (albeit not at Christmas time) with the first new musical there in over 20 years — bringing thousands of people through the door who had never been to the national theatre before. That felt pretty special. And for one glorious night in May 2012, we took over the entire building, running amok with Alice upstairs on the main stage and WERK downstairs in the Peacock. Cue legendary party.
End Cycle 1.
If the first cycle is all about ideas, the second is all about expanding our world view. That is, we travelled the world touring. A lot.
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Watch: Panti in All Dolled Up (2013)
Mainly with Panti and her "Sharp, radical, perceptive, hilarious" (Joyce McMillan) shows, but with other work too. We toured around and around the world. Putting ideas in front of different audiences, refining them, seeing lots of other work, gathering more collaborators, making great friends and building building building. We ran THISISPOPBABY from kitchen tables and cafes in multiple different time zones. It wasn’t easy, Ireland was in the depths of recession and we were both being pulled in lots of different directions, but it was fun. Fun! Still a central pillar of what we do and why we do it.
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Watch: RIOT at Dublin Fringe (2016)
At one point, perhaps in some festival beer garden or another in one of the hemispheres, we looked around at the pervasiveness and popularity of the large entertainment 'Spiegeltent show’ and thought: We should make one of these shows. And it should be really, really IRISH. Cut to Merrion Square some time later, and Dublin Fringe Festival is going off. RIOT, our Spiegeltent show, is having this wild effect on audiences that we could have only dreamed of. We were confident enough it would work, but we didn’t think we would be smashing Fringe box office records, winning awards and sending people into a kind of glorious cathartic frenzy. The show had meant, and still means, a lot to people.
Sometimes a show can light up a city, and this was one of those times. A moment that stands out is how uncomfortable Mel Gibson was watching the show! We are proudly not everyone’s cup of tea. RIOT went on to play Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, New York and Dublin thrice. Cue many, many legendary nights out.
End Cycle 2.
Everything accelerated after RIOT. The company took on more of a structure. More people and more things; more trust from more stakeholders and a hell of a lot more responsibility — all essential and gratifying but also quite the step change. Our audiences, at this point, were both significant and dedicated — following us from club and field to main theatre stages.
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Watch: Claire Dunne in Sure Look It, F*ck It (2019)
The slate of work grew, as we continued our exploration of form and context. Dublin City, always a significant player in our work, became a central character in our Where We Live programme at St Patrick’s Festival. A wildly ambitious endeavour, where we took over and transformed a city-centre building for two weeks and filled it with ideas from 80 artists, Where We Live was a response to how it feels and what it means to live in Dublin and Ireland today.
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Watch: Where We Live (2020)
The programme, in 2018 and again in 2020, spoke to and of the city, celebrating its successes and criticising its failings. It struck a deep chord with new and diverse audiences, as we, along with our associate artists, continued to advocate for social change. It was magic.
It was on the opening day of S**T, the headline show at Where We Live 2020, that the first pandemic lockdown was announced — all cultural venues were to be closed at 6pm, and that was that. The shows would not go on.
A year and a half later, we got back on stage with a brilliant outing of Mark O’Halloran’s Conversations After Sex at Dublin Theatre Festival. A soulful look at connection and loneliness in the city. Something we could all relate to after several lockdowns and next to no physical touch. If the show was reflective and melancholic, the audience reaction was not. The audiences went wild. We were back, baby.
End Cycle 3.
So here we are at 15. At the magic moment where cycle 4 begins. As we launch an absolute banger of a 15-year anniversary programme, change is in the air yet again.
In 2022, we’re delving into the underbelly of queer culture with new dance/theatre piece about desire, intimacy, isolation and addiction called Party Scene, by Philip Connaughton and Phillip McMahon. We’re building on the success of Tara Flynn’s 2018 hit Not a Funny Word, with Haunted, a new play exploring grief and loss with heart and humour.
In the Autumn, we're premiering our biggest show in over five years, WAKE, a radical celebration of ritual, connection and the power of community — sitting somewhere between a party and a purging. All this plus cooking up lots more plans, including for a brand new Panti show.
But first, we’re picking up where we left off two years ago by finally presenting S**T — an electrifying, scratchy, banger of a play from award-winning playwright Patricia Cornelius, directed by Jennifer Jennings.
Bizarrely and beautifully, it’s also 15 years to the week that we were first out of the traps as a company with Danny and Chantelle (Still Here), in the same venue, our home, Project Arts Centre. Although they’re letting us play on the big stage this time around.
It’ll be some party.
S**T is at the Project Arts Centre from March 3nd-5th 2022 - find out more here.
