Reared by the Abbey, empowered by its stage

'It started with flags and headbands," Shaun Dunne jokes, remembering the time he spent as a child selling souvenirs outside Croke Park on match days, minutes from his home near the Royal Canal. "Get your flags and headbands," he shouts theatrically. "That's my 'penny apples' moment."

Dunne is about to have his playwriting debut at another local landmark, the Abbey Theatre, which has been something of a second home for the young writer since he was 10 years old. He first attended the theatre as a participant in the Abbey's education and outreach programme. "It was a real, 'Here, you kids from town, get off the streets and come in and make a play.' But I loved it." After being cast in Jim Nolan's Blackwater Angel on the Abbey's main stage when he was 11, he found himself with a burgeoning acting career.

The plays that Dunne saw during those years at the Abbey did not particularly resonate with him, but he found himself excited by the form itself.

"A lot of kids would go to the panto and that," he says, "but all of my first experiences of going to theatre were at the Abbey. I mean, the first play I ever saw was The House of Bernarda Alba. I wasn't having a conversation with myself about style or theme or anything, but I was just so impressed by the scale of things, the live artness of it, the fact that it wasn't a film."

Dunne’s experiences with the Abbey were formative in another way. “It wasn’t just that you were talking about art or that you were making plays about your own life. What was really useful about the programme was that you were in the theatre and your family would come and watch you. It was about trying to generate community through drama.”

Community theatre

This idea of community has become central to Dunne's work with Talking Shop Ensemble, the theatre company he established with a group of friends in 2008. Indeed, he seems more comfortable talking about citizens than characters, social agency than plot, and each of his plays so far has drawn its form and subject matter from real life.

His 2011 play I Am a Homebird (It's Really Hard) examined his attitude to the emigration of his twin sister and friends, using excerpts from newspapers and documentary video footage. Death of a Tradesman (2012) used similar theatrical tools to examine postboom Ireland and the legions of tradesmen it left behind. The company's latest work, Advocacy, explores the world of intellectual disability through the eyes of service providers, based on more than two years of close study, during which Dunne shadowed his fellow company member Aisling O'Brien.

Fictional lens

Dunne’s approach to research is rigorous; he studied journalism rather than drama at college. “My parents were delighted,” he says as he explains the rationale for his degree. “They are Dubliners. They thought it was great that I wanted to write, but they also thought, Get a job, get a job. They enjoyed the fact that I was doing my thing in the Abbey, but they always secretly hoped I would grow out of it. I think they were relieved when I started doing journalism, but I was like, ‘Listen, I’m only doing journalism with a view to making art eventually, right?’

“I was really most interested in making documentaries, particularly for radio, and that definitely informed what I wanted to do in theatre: play around with written reality, make work that would come from a place of truth but apply a fictional lens to it.”

Dunne's new play for the Abbey, The Waste Ground Party, is something different entirely. "There's people talking to each other for a start," he jokes, "so, yeah, you could say it's something new." He wrote the play when he participated in the Abbey's new-playwright programme, and Dunne never thought it would get produced. "I wrote it as an exercise, as a challenge to myself, to set certain boundaries, like no one should talk to the audience, and the action should take place in real time. Not that I stuck to all the rules. But it's definitely the most narrative thing I have ever done."

The play is set over a single night when a group of old friends gather for a drinking session. Dunne explains that it is “about growing up in town, but it is also about access to education, how much access I had – to the Abbey, to all of it – because of where I am from, because I am part of a particular demographic. It’s about me and the lads I grew up with and where we are in regards to each other now.”

He rarely meets his old school friends. They do not come to see his plays, he says, but Dunne imagines that they will hear about The Waste Ground Party, "because it's on in the Abbey and they'll pass the Abbey. It is part of the landscape when you live in town. People have a history with it. My dad used to sell newspapers outside it when he was my age."

This personal anecdote turns into a larger political point about art and disenfranchisement. “I hate when people talk about what a rough area the Abbey is in, giving out about drug addicts outside. As if the theatre should move because art should be in a nicer spot. Well, let it be on a street that needs a bit of intervention. Let that be part of the conversation. That’s part of Dublin too.”

Advocacy is at Project Arts Centre from September 6th to 13th as part of Tiger Dublin Fringe. The Waste Ground Party is at the Peacock Theatre from October 29th to November 22nd