As part of our Pride celebrations, acclaimed playwright Phillip McMahon revisits his journey from youth theatre to becoming one of Ireland's most celebrated theatremakers, and having his work featured on the Leaving Certificate curriculum...
I received a message request on Instagram recently. I opened it expecting to encounter a bot trying to scam me out of coin, but instead there was a note from a teenager; a school student in the sunny south-east. They were writing to tell me that their class was studying my play Once Before I Go and that reading the play out loud in lessons had been the most fun they'd had together all year.
Since my play (A fantasia on queer kinship over four decades) was added to Ireland’s Leaving Cert curriculum, I've been getting messages from all over the country. Sometimes students want to know what happens after the play ends ("It’s yours now - write your own Part 2!"), and sometimes they simply want to confide that they are queer themselves and to say they feel less alone having read the play.
I didn't have a Once Before I Go to pour over in the boys comprehensive I attended on Dublin’s northside in the 1990s, but I did know what it was to feel alone. Most queer kids know that feeling all too well and it’s scary. My teenage years took a dramatic deviation when I found myself, by chance, knocking on the door of Dublin Youth Theatre around 1995. I’d never seen a play before, but I was bored and drifting, looking for something, anything, to do. Joining the youth theatre was like being transported to another world; a hyper-colourful wonderful place where I met another me - a me that I recognised and liked. A me who was one of many rather than the isolated oddball. In the theatre, I found a home.
From my first encounter with it, theatre has made me feel less alone. That's it’s magic sauce.
Once I’d found it, I made theatre my world. It has always been my refuge and my playground. But outside the cocoon of the youth theatre, the industry wasn’t always so welcoming. Even today, theatre continues to be terrified of working-class artists and audiences, but more than that, I found the theatre industry in Dublin to be homophobic when I was starting out in the early 2000s. There were almost no queer stories onstage, and even a hint of femininity meant that actors weren’t considered for lead roles. So people hid their queerness - and hiding is a lonely thing to do.
In late 2006, a few of us loaded up a brand-new (metaphorical) theatre truck, christened it THISISPOPBABY and drove the thing through the wall of the theatrical establishment. Our aim was to make theatre speak to what it was to be young, angry and fabulous in Ireland at that time. We didn’t give a f**k what anyone thought about us - we were just determined to have a good time and to try to convince our peers that theatre was not a dead art form. Jenny Jennings (my co-director and co-conspirator) and I have never been ones for talking no for an answer, so quickly we found ourselves running a THISISPOPBABY venue at Electric Picnic for three years, staging a brand new Musical, Alice In Funderland, at the Abbey Theatre, touring Panti Bliss around the world, running our own festival called Queer Notions in Dublin - amongst many more electric theatre happenings.
Out of all this glittering energy came a show that would solidify THISISPOPBABY as merchant’s of craic and true torch bearers of theatre as an vital artform. That show was RIOT, and it would be taken to heart by audiences in Dublin before circling the world, where it gathered groupies in Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto and New York. RIOT (starring Panti Bliss, Emmet Kirwan, The Sirens, Up & Over It, Lords of Strut) was the biggest scream on THISISPOPBABY’s roller coaster, so it’s a thrill to have it back in its spiritual home of Vicar Street in Dublin this July for six shows only.
From my first encounter with it, theatre has made me feel less alone. That’s it’s magic sauce. It connects us and asks us to look at the mirror of the world together, however funny, sad or uncomfortable that is.
My play Once Before I Go and our extravaganza RIOT have a few things in common. Both pieces give two fingers to conformity. Both pieces say we are here, we are fabulous, and we have always been here. They celebrate difference - our country made stronger by diversity. And both pieces make the case for theatre as rock and roll.
THISISPOPBABY's RIOT runs from 17-20 July 2025 at Vicar Street, Dublin - find out more here
