In Conversation with Emmet Kirwan

Emmet Kirwan is currently touring his show Accents, which will come to The Everyman on Tuesday 18 and Wednesday 19 February. This 2025 tour of the show is dedicated to the memory of the late musician Eoin French who composed the music for the show.

The play takes the form of eight poems delivered against Eoin French’s incredible soundtrack. The show has its own unique universe with its own gravitational pull, with an expanding and contracting celestial rhythm driven by playwright and spoken-word artist Emmet Kirwan, under the compelling and energetic direction of one of Ireland’s most exciting directors, Claire O’Reilly.

Emmet kindly accepted to do an interview to give us some insights about the show and theatre in general.

 

What is the inspiration behind Accents?

It started off as an idea to do a poetry play with music. I met Eoin French on a radio show where we were both performing about seven years ago, and I was just really struck by how beautiful a singer he was. I had heard his music before, but didn’t know that that was Talos. His voice was so beautiful… He has a very high voice for a male singer – he’s a real countertenor. I was really struck by how beautifully he sang and played the music he was performing with his band. I performed a piece from a play that I had written. We were chatting afterwards, and he said, “if you ever need music for anything…” and I just took him by his word! I was thinking about writing a play at the time and I asked him if he would be interested in getting involved.

I put in the application for it in 2019. Then Covid happened, but we’d kind of started working on it and talking about it, about the idea of going into memory to try and unpack memories that have been boxed away. One of the poems still in the play is about that idea. It’s like somebody doing an excavation on their lives, as if they were unpacking boxes from a move. Then my wife gave birth to our son and that became a huge part of the play – the idea of what’s your life like before and after. Because of delays with the application and with Covid, the play took on a new kind of life really.

At the beginning of 2022, Claire O’Reilly, Eoin and I came together to develop it and it’s a great play! Claire has a brilliant analytical mind, so she had been going through it structurally and dramaturgically. We came up with the ideas and she would push us towards a collaboration that would yield fruits that made sense narratively. Then, Brian and Ben came in and started to make stuff together, bringing everything together.

 

Do you have any particularly fond memory of your collaboration with Eoin? 

It’s hard to come up with an anecdote. He was funny though. He just had such a great sense of humour, slagging himself! He was so self-deprecating because he was so talented. He was so unself-serious as a person, but very serious about his work, about his art. Working with him was a really nice experience because he was always quite light and quite fun. He had that Cork sense of humour. We were joking about calling the play Lads the Musical!

The main thing about working with him would be the way he would go off to produce something after you put an idea to him. He’d come back the next morning and it would be fully formed. Once, I had this idea of a rap song in the middle of it because most of the pieces are just spoken-word poems. It was a bit of a mental idea, but Eoin didn’t really have the heart to say it was a terrible idea, so he just said he didn’t have any music for it.

 

In what way does the soundscape enhance the play?

There is a version of it that could be acapella, but the music really does shift the audience’s perception of what’s being heard into different moods and states. It sets the pace in a way that set and lighting can do, but it elevates it. I don’t know what it would be without the music. It might be like a standard spoken-word one-man show. There are so many gear shifts in the music, and each piece of music is so different and expansive. Sometimes, it’s almost there as an accompaniment and at other times, it’s almost like you’re in conversation with the music or in a battle with it. It’s something that complements, it’s something you’re almost dancing with or in conversation with, as in, you say something, and it repeats it back to you.

 

How do you find this piece of theatre, using poetry as its main form of expression, is being received by the audience? Who do you think would enjoy it?

It’s a great question because I often try to think who would enjoy this and I meet the people afterwards and they all seem to be from vastly different places, age groups, genders… I have my own theories and then I’m blown out of the water by who shows up!

It can be a hard sell when telling people that it’s going to be spoken word because they might not like it. There’s an image of theatre that it’s something to be appreciated; and of course it is a very enjoyable art form, but the reading of poetry can be quite flat. For instance, The New Yorker has two new poems every week and they often have the poets read their own work through the app, but a lot of poets are not used to reading their poetry and they almost do it in a sonorous telling of it. Or in Ireland, people would read their own poetry taking on the cadences that would be like the sound of a priest. When you tell people that the play itself is almost exclusively poetry, they could probably balk at that idea, so it’s about trying to create something that’s really energetic, that has many shifts in tone and inflection, that has comedy, that has speed and slowed-down pace when it needs to be. It’s about something that will have as much variation and as much dramatic variation as a regular play but done through poems. People are impressed by the athleticism of delivery. So, if you can match those three things: movement (which is one of the great laws of theatre), pace and the delivery of that material; and you can do all three of those things with a level of expertise and a level of athleticism, then that can be quite entertaining for people. I’m creating something that’s really dynamic on stage and appears to be almost the opposite of what you would think a play or poetry reading is.

 

Could you give three words to describe the play?

Musical, loving and political. It acts as a kind of love letter to my wife and my family, and to life essentially. There is politics in it in relation to how families operate in a time when they are living life delays or being moved from pillar to post because they’re experiencing the housing crisis. And musical: for Eoin French’s beautiful score.

 

Do you believe theatre is an accessible art form?

An accessible art form… There’s always more that can be done to make theatre more accessible. I’m working currently with a group of young people who have experience of care and you see how difficult it can be if you don’t come from a theatre background. When you don’t come from a background that’s stable in some way, how do you access an art form that you’ve never been brought up with, that you’ve never even really experienced? It can be something that is not even on the radar of a lot of people. I think accessibility for people with disabilities needs to be improved. Good work has been done, but more can obviously be done. I think that now people are changing not just attitudes, but they’re actually changing structural issues around that. That also goes for people from backgrounds that might not traditionally be represented: working class backgrounds, traveller backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds, and how we can make those spaces kind of open to young people too?

I think it’s more accessible now, but the way to stop the inaccessibility from happening is to keep third-level education free or reduce fees. If they make drama schools where you have to pay thousands of euros to attend, it could be very hard for people entering the arts either in directing, lighting, writing, playwriting or acting specifically, that they might not ever get to a point where they earn enough money in their career to repay such a debt. It would then become an art form that can only be accessed by people of incredible means.

The other thing is to make theatre prices and theatre tickets cheap enough for students, for young people, for OAPs, for people with disabilities; making it a place that they feel they can afford to go, and also a place where they feel they are welcome. I think that sometimes big theatres might not be aware of things they’re doing that might not make them seem accessible or welcoming.

 

What role do you think theatre plays in our society?

I think it’s shifted a lot. For the last 300 years, it was a place that was primarily for entertainment, but there were moments – in revolutionary periods essentially – when playwrights were working in tandem with what was changing in society and had a great potential to reflect the society or what was actually happening in a political or satirical way and to skewer power or people in power. Obviously because of the explosion of the novel, film, music, television and all different forms of art, theatre has had to compete with all these other things, but its role in society is still the same. Ultimately, you can get away with things and say things in the theatrical space that you can’t get away with on television or in film.

I think there’s a much greater emphasis in theatre to reflect society as it is, and also how we want it to be, and to tell stories that are analytical of the failings of different things. I think its role is to constantly challenge the idea of who we are as a state, as a nation and as a people. There is a space for plays that are there to just entertain – you do owe people a good night out – but it becomes kind of worthless when it’s not saying something new or doing something new.

I think what would be great to see is a push towards much more new writing in Irish theatre. That would be my hope…because if it’s not new, then it’s old; and if it’s old, then what is it saying about the present time; and if it’s not saying anything about the present time, then it’s not really doing anything other than giving everyone employment!

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