Juno and the Paycock: ‘You can smell the poverty off this production’

'People want plays that are modern," says actor Emmet Kirwan. "People just want to see stuff that they recognise in their own lives, that they can identify with. Even if middle-class people come to see a play about working-class people, they will still identify with the human themes of it. They want modern plays that are about now."

Last month, the 35-year-old Tallaght-born actor came out of the third run of Dublin Oldschool, a play he wrote and starred in about Dublin, dance music and addiction. He is now playing Charles Bentham, a teacher with notions, in the latest run of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock at the Gate Theatre. (A few streets away at the Abbey, O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars is also getting a fresh airing.)

"Dublin has changed but at the same time it's remained very similar in lots of ways," he says. "There's that abject poverty and wretchedness in this play [Juno and the Paycock] that still exists in Dublin Oldschool as well. There are still people living in food-poverty and under constant threat of becoming homeless . . . In a sense, what ails this society now is still what ailed society back then."

The only difference now, says Kirwan, is that we pretend to care. “Now there’s this veneer of ‘We have to do something about it’. But nothing is done. In the early part of the Free State, the slums were still as wretched as possible, and after 10 years of the Free State government under Cumann na nGaedheal, they did nothing about it. They let them rot.

“We’re coming full circle again because that’s what needs to be done. We need to get rid of rack-renting landlords and slumlords and put people into f***ing proper houses that are built by local authorities so they can have somewhere that actually looks after them.”

Techno weekends

In Dublin Oldschool, Kirwan wanted to capture what it's like "to be alive in Dublin right now. A lot of subcultures in Ireland . . . when they're put on stage, they're often written by outsiders looking in.

“I wanted to write something from the inside looking out. I was big into dance music and techno, and still am. I knew a lot of DJs and that world of living for the weekend. I said, if I don’t tell these stories, they’re going to dissipate, so I want to put them all down for the record, that this existed, this happened, this was a time and it was exciting, visceral, it was romantic, like punk in the late 1970s.”

The play told the story of two brothers, one a recovering heroin addict and the other, played by Kirwan, a DJ who dabbles in ecstasy and ketamine.

“The job is never to be a moralist or an activist; it’s kind of dissident,” he says. “You show the world as it exists and you give people an insight into that world, and that’s all you can do. You can have a message or something you’re trying to say, but you have to make it more elliptical, you have to smuggle it into the play, the way O’Casey does. No one wants to be sat in a theatre and lectured to for an hour and a half. You owe people a narrative; you owe people a good time. You can get away with anything if you work a few jokes into it, and maybe a few dance moves.”

This is one reason he prefers working in theatre to working in television, although he has numerous TV credits under his belt, including Sarah & Steve, a show he wrote and starred in for RTÉ.

"RTÉ wouldn't allow me write a show like Dublin Oldschool because there are characters that do drugs that don't learn lessons," he says. "With Sarah & Steve, I got away with it a bit, but there always has to be something like 'He did ecstasy and then he drove a car off a cliff' or 'He smoked weed and he got ate by a dog'.

"As a dramatist, you never want to attach morality to anything you write; you just want to present it. That's what O'Casey does with Juno and the Paycock. He just presents the characters, and you make up your own mind about them."

Kirwan won the Stewart Parker Trust new playwright award for 2014, which gave him a bursary to write his next play. The Last Partalonian, a speculative work set 50 years in the future in a dystopian Tallaght, is based on Celtic mythology. The play has 12 characters, which he says might mean it's left as "a dusty manuscript" once it's written.

“Writers now can’t write plays with more than three or four people because of economics,” he says. “O’Casey was able to write a play and have 12 or 13 characters. Writers are restricted in what they can put on the stage, so the stories they can tell are limited. But you need new exciting plays, because the best writing comes from theatre.”

He is also writing a comedy set in a video shop, about a gay man from Tallaght growing up in the 1990s, and then he’s done with the suburb.

"I was watching Brendan Behan the other day and everything is about when he was in prison," Kirwan says. "I don't want people to accuse me of only having one idea."

For the moment, however, he says he's delighted to be working with Juno and the Paycock's director, Mark O'Rowe, who is aiming to bring the show back to its roots.

“As the play went through the 20th century, the comedy elements started to overtake productions. With this production, it’s rooted more firmly in what it originally was; there’s a much more naturalistic realism to it,” Kirwan says. “It seems more like a tenement now. It’s close, it’s claustrophobic. A lot of the time when you see this, you don’t see the wretchedness of what the working class lived in, but you can smell the poverty off this production. Hopefully, people will see how the poor can be f***ed over, when they are continually still.”

• Juno and the Paycock is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until April 16th