Heartbreak a ‘rage against hypocrisy of Ireland in 2016’

Emmet Kirwan, whose powerful spoken-word film Heartbreak has gone viral, says it is "his rage against the hypocrisy of Ireland in 2016, an Ireland that claims to look after the vulnerable".

Written last year, the centenary of the 1916 Rising, Heartbreak was first performed as part of Riot! – a Thisispopbaby production for the Dublin Fringe Festival.

Now a seven-minute film, it follows the journey of a young teenage mother, pregnant and unable to afford an abortion. She has her baby, goes back to education and confronts the daily misogyny of Irish society.

In one heart-stopping moment she rounds on some men harassing her on the street while walking with her young son, declaring: “I am not defined by the fact that I am some man’s daughter, sister, cousin, mother. I am a woman and I have agency because I am breathing air, mother f****r!”

By Wednesday evening the film had more than 600,000 views on Facebook, since going live on Tuesday evening. It was made by director Dave Tynan and producer Michael Donnelly, the same team responsible for We Face This Land, a short film made for the Repeal project last year and filmed on Greystones beach.

Kirwan says he has been “overwhelmed” by the reaction to the film.

“I was actually expecting the usual trolls to attack it, say what they didn’t like. So yes, it’s overwhelming . . . It resonates so much I suppose because it’s real and it’s not the happy, unified vision of Ireland the Government would like us to have. No artist is going to present that.”

Enraged voice

Asked whether it is ironic that his, a man’s voice, is delivering what is essentially a woman’s enraged voice, he agrees, explaining however it is also an articulation of his rage against what women face in Ireland.

“It is also a poem about me as a man coming around to feminism – a bit late in the day maybe, in my 30s. My girlfriend, Ali, told me about her experiences and I realised, ‘women go through this every day’.”

Heartbreak does not feature in Kirwan's play Dublin Oldschool, which has just sold out at the National Theatre in London and is selling fast in theatres here.

A dark comedy, it follows Jason, a wannabe DJ on a chemically enhanced trip through the streets of Dublin as he stumbles across a familiar face from the past, his brother Daniel.

Daniel is an educated, homeless addict. The brothers haven’t seen or spoken to each other in three years.

Kirwan is happy one of the first Irish plays to sell out in London in 2017 portrays a “more accurate” vision of Ireland than the establishment here might wish.

"It draws on my experiences growing up in Tallaght. Its central themes are homelessness and heroin addiction. It's not Ireland of the dancing maidens."

Dublin Oldschool opens in the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray on Saturday before travelling to London. It runs in Dublin on February 3rd and 4th, travels to Tallaght and Belfast and returns to Dublin on February 13th for a week.