Conversations After Sex: ‘We’re naked at the top of the show. You can’t get more vulnerable than that’

Kate Stanley-Brennan’s first time on stage was in the Rupert Guinness Theatre by the Guinness factory in Dublin. She was eight years old, and played Levi, one of the characters in Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat. Peter Coonan played Joseph. That musical begins with the song Any Dream Will Do: “I closed my eyes, drew back the curtain, to see for certain what I thought I knew. Far far away, someone was weeping, but the world was sleeping. Any dream will do.”

If you were to transpose those lyrics on to the latest production she’s starring in, they might, bizarrely, work. Conversations After Sex, written by Mark O’Halloran, directed by Tom Creed, and produced by Thisispopbaby, sees Stanley-Brennan as the character She, a woman unmoored. The landscape She constructs to search for – and lose – herself, is a maze of intimacy. In seeking to connect, disconnect, heal and self-destruct, She finds moments of beauty and catharsis in the conversations that emerge after sharing intimate moments with strangers. Unusually structured, the play - which won Best New Play at The Irish Times Theatre Awards last year - unfolds as a series of encounters, during which open, vulnerable, funny, and heartbreaking post-coital conversations are had.

Fionn Ó Loingsigh plays multiple characters, a conveyor belt of varying form, attitude, and disposition. He, Stanley-Brennan says, “was in the trenches with me day in, day out. We really made our versions of these characters together, and he will be a pal for life now. We’ve been through the war together – naked! That’s got to bond you to someone, but our working relationship was essential. I can’t imagine doing it with someone with a big ego, or who isn’t sound. That would have been a complete nightmare.” Clelia Murphy plays She’s sister, showing up in surprising ways, adding another layer to the emotional fabric of the work.

Conversations After Sex found its way into the world following a long period of development, presented first at Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, and then at the 2021 Dublin Theatre Festival. When I speak to Stanley-Brennan, she’s in New York, in her bedroom, staring out at Midtown buildings on a particularly misty day. The play has enjoyed a hugely successful run at the Irish Arts Centre in Hell’s Kitchen, before returning to Ireland for a national tour this month.

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Stanley-Brennan doesn’t know whether her propensity towards acting was nature or nurture. Both of her parents are actors, Stephen Brennan and Martina Stanley, “all my aunties and uncles on my father’s side, my grandmother (Daphne Carroll) and my grandfather (Denis Brennan). My earliest memories are seeing Dad in The Gate. I just thought it was magic. I looked up to actors so much. Even being brought backstage, seeing the stage with the lights off and the curtain down, I just thought it was the most exciting thing imaginable.”

She went to Trinity College to study theatre but left after two years and moved to New York on a J1 visa. After around a fortnight in the city, she was leaving a club, Avalon, formerly the Limelight, when a woman approached her, inviting her to a party, “she brought me to an after-hours, introduced me to all these incredible club kids and vogueing queens. I felt like I was home. I ended up working for them, living with them, and having….” she searches for an understatement, “… quite the experience.” This time was formative, “It shaped the rest of my life,” she says, “the direction I took my practice, the type of stuff I made, the music I made, how I dressed.” She drew from this experience to write and perform in Walk For Me, at Project Arts Centre in 2019.

Her craft and graft has seen her perform in Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey, Salomé at The Gate, in Druid’s Crestfall, the Lyric Hammersmith and the Abbey’s The Plough and the Stars, and as the ringmaster in Thisispopbaby’s Riot, taking over from Emmet Kirwan’s role and creating something very different but equally potent. When Conversations After Sex brought her back to New York, her commute to the theatre was a stroll down 42nd Street. Performing in a play in the city, she says, “is an absolute bucket-list dream.”

I won’t say it’s been an easy experience, it’s been very intense at times, but hugely fun as well

At first, she wasn’t sure how the play would translate – the accents, the humour, the Dublin references – but the New York audiences responded emphatically. “Lots of laughter, lots of sobbing. They’ll come up to us, every night, because a strange thing happens where they think we’re still the characters,” Stanley-Brennan says. “Because my character listens to all these different men and their stories throughout the show, they think I’m an open book, so they come up and share stories. I have heard many a story here!”

[ Conversations After Sex, written by Mark O’Halloran ]

The previous night, women approached Stanley-Brennan and Ó Loingsigh and started talking about their sexual experiences, “One went, ‘I can’t believe I’m sharing so much with you. I’ve only just met you!’” A couple of nights previously, a woman who had seen the play, was sitting at the bar afterwards. She saw the cast, bought them a drink, and burst into tears, “just like sobbing at the bar.”

Around four years before Conversations After Sex first premiered, Stanley-Brennan was asked to do a workshop with O’Halloran and Creed, “Jenny [Jennings] was in the room as well, if my memory serves me,” Stanley-Brennan says of the acclaimed Thisispopbaby producer and director. At the time, the play was in a different structure, and there were four couples. After that workshop, O’Halloran changed tack, and focused instead on the character, She. Several more workshops and periods of development followed. “I’ve lived with this,” Stanley-Brennan says, “I’ve seen it develop, which you don’t always get to do, to be that close to a project. I won’t say it’s been an easy experience, it’s been very intense at times, but hugely fun as well.”

Stanley-Brennan credits the open, safe, and generous atmosphere both O’Halloran and Creed created, as key. Among the intensity and darkness being explored, Stanley-Brennan says O’Halloran kept saying “it’s a comedy!” The laughter and lightness within the play is needed, Stanley-Brennan says, “You need to laugh as a release.”

It will leave you with a full heart. If you’re a human, you’re going to connect to this play

In the encounters on stage, anonymity acts as a catalyst for vulnerability and openness. The audience tracks how actions unfold in response to trauma, how it can be impossible to love someone who doesn’t love themselves, and how the impulse to hook up has multiple emotional authors. Stanley-Brennan speaks of how “it’s in the spaces in between the words where all the drama lies.”

The trust demanded of the audience in the performers is immediate. “We’re literally naked at the top of the show, so you can’t get more vulnerable than that,” Stanley-Brennan says. “Where do you go from there? You have an agreement with the audience.” In general, nudity on stage, she says, is a complicated state. “I don’t know if it always works. Sometimes it’s not necessary. Sometimes it can take you out of the action. But I think in this, it really works. We get it out the way immediately… Each scene is post-coital, so it’s a great way to level us with the audience. We’re all on the same page then.”

[ ‘I want to say something nice, but I think I’m a bit of a control freak’ ]

With live performance halted during the pandemic, Stanley-Brennan and her friend, Charlene Gleeson, began working on an idea Gleeson had for a short film, Cherry, which Stanley-Brennan ended up directing as well as starring in. She has since written and directed another. In this process, she’s discovered how much she enjoys being behind the camera, saying she has always felt “kind of uncomfortable” in front of it.

Working through initial reticence appears to be one of Stanley-Brennan’s strengths as an artist. With tickets flying out for the Irish tour of Conversations After Sex, audiences will encounter the depth of connection that’s created when a creative team is prepared to bare their souls, and mine personal experience in a search for meaning. “It’s honest, beautiful, truthful, relatable, heartbreakingly, humorous at times, incredibly moving, heart-wrenching,” Stanley-Brennan says. “It will leave you with a full heart. If you’re a human, you’re going to connect to this play.”

Conversations After Sex, written by Mark O’Halloran, returns to Project Arts Centre from April 19th-22nd and tours Ireland until May 20th. thisispopbaby.com