Malaprop’s hot topic: ‘We like people to leave wanting to generate a conversation’

Earth is overheating. The polar ice caps are melting. In 50 years, coastal towns will be underwater, yet governments continue to twiddle their thumbs. It’s not the most obvious starting point for a musical comedy, but Malaprop beg to differ.

For Hothouse, their new Dublin Fringe Festival show, the Irish theatre company are intertwining a multigenerational, century-spanning family drama with the pertinent political and social topic of climate change, throwing a few musical numbers into the mix for good measure. Ambitious? Perhaps, but Hothouse aims to both challenge and entertain in a play about “horny songbirds, parents, love, legacy and wanting to change but not knowing how”.

The play was originally intended to be staged in March 2020, after Thisispopbaby commissioned it for their Where We Live festival, but the plug had to be pulled as the world went into lockdown. “Oh, it’s thrilling,” Claire O’Reilly, the show’s director, says about finally being able to stage the play. “I mean, it has been quite traumatic, because the process has been so long, and there’s been so many hiccups on massive scales and minor scales along the way – but it’s been a real privilege to come back to it and give it a bit more time.”

[ Dublin Fringe Festival: Full coverage here ]

In a funny way, Hothouse’s long gestation has been to its benefit, according to Molly O’Cathain, the show’s set and costume designer. “We’ve been able to look at the piece, put it on ice, think about it, leave it alone and consider things over the years it was on pause – and that has allowed us to come back much stronger.”

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The remit of the six-piece Malaprop collective, which formed in 2015 in and around Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Theatre and its DU Players drama society, has always been to examine big questions through a playful lens. Their recent work includes BlackCatfishMusketeer, which looked at the positives and negatives of online dating; Where Sat the Lovers, about family and mental health; and Love+, which tackled sex and technology.

Climate change can be so depressing and relentless – when you’re hit with this barrage of information and doom all the time, you get desensitised. So it’s difficult to be moved by it, or to cry about it, whereas it’s not so difficult to make people laugh to connect with something

“We were pretty prolific in those early days, and I think that’s the beauty of collaboration,” O’Reilly says. “When you’ve got someone in every discipline it means you can respond to things quite quickly. We were taking these big topics, which can often be dark or research-heavy, and we wanted to find the theatricality and playfulness in that. So I think those two things became our mission statement.”

Thisispopbaby commissioned Hothouse after seeing Malaprop’s two-hander Jericho, which was first staged in 2017. “We went away and came back with a five-hander musical,” says O’Reilly, laughing. Anna Clock, Hothouse’s composer and sound designer, adds: “I think maybe I didn’t realise the scale of what we were making until we’d almost made it, in that first development period... It was kind of just snowballing, and then it was, like, ‘Oh God, we’re making a musical in three weeks!’”

Global warming was first mooted as a subject by Maeve O’Mahony, one of the Malaprop collective, who is also in the cast. “Climate change can be so depressing and relentless – when you’re hit with this barrage of information and doom all the time, you get desensitised,” O’Reilly says. “So it’s actually difficult to be moved by it, or to cry about it, whereas it’s not so difficult to make people laugh to connect with something. So you connect in a different way.”

The script, by Carys D Coburn, who has also written much of Malaprop’s other work, interweaves a triptych of family stories set in 1969, the present day and 100 years in the future in such a way as to leave room for playfulness. “There are some very heavy conversations in this. Carys has done an amazing job of focusing on familial trauma and inherited behaviour within families, which is just such a brilliant way of accessing this global issue in a very domestic and intimate way,” O’Reilly says. “It’s not always funny, but it’s kind of weird, and bizarre, and it makes you think about something in a different way. Some of the images really facilitate this heightened, bizarre world.”

“We had this background of people on stage being showgirls, but they’re also birds – and birds sing,” Clock says. “And there’s also this cruise-ship entertainment facet, so I got into that showgirl, showbiz kind of thing as a framework. We came back to it and threw a lot of ideas around in a kind of R&D process. We had these amazing performers, and I’d get them to improvise around styles. I definitely worked instinctively with stuff. I tend to just read the words and lash out ideas, and then sit back and say, ‘Does this make dramaturgical sense?’”

“The visual and aural world are so dramaturgically woven in, it’s all one,” O’Reilly says. “We’re three directors, in a way.”

O’Cathain drew inspiration from the stories told by a friend who worked as a technician on a cruise ship, “this mad, floating maritime world that’s almost lawless, where the captain is god”.

“The language of entertainment, and what we think of as ‘entertaining’, informed a lot of the design choices that we made,” she says. “And it was also informed by the practicalities of a really big, fast-moving show that goes to a lot of places. We wanted to be able to keep the pace up and keep things mobile, as well, because if you go to see a big mainstream musical, things move and change, and that feeds into short attention spans where you need to keep refreshing the image.”

“I think there is a conceptual deliberateness to how manic it feels,” O’Reilly adds. “It’s kind of like cannibalising your focus in the way that something like TikTok does, or the way that the people who create entertainment think our brains need, or want. And so there is this kind of manic sense.” She smiles. “Hopefully it’s done in a deliberate way and won’t just leave everyone with a migraine.”

[ Dublin Fringe Festival 2023: 562 performances in 32 venues, including 45 world and 18 Irish premieres ]

O’Cathain was driven to be as sustainable as possible with costumes and sets, hiring and borrowing, or using second-hand materials, wherever she could. Malaprop intend to tour the play both nationally and internationally, and they hope to find a sustainable way of doing that, too. For its debut run, at Fringe, they’d like it to spark conversations about the climate crisis, at the very least.

“We definitely don’t just want [the audience] to be entertained,” O’Reilly says. “As with all our work, we like people to leave wanting to Google something, wanting to ask people about something, wanting to generate a conversation. That remains the case here. But, also, the things the characters are grappling with include not taking on all of this burden as an individual. In terms of climate activism, it has to be communal. It can’t be one person getting stressed about their recycling, because that is just not helpful, and it won’t effect change in any way. So community and consideration are the two main pillars, because once you start monitoring your own behaviour you realise how mindless you are – and, actually, it’s not the biggest thing to just be a little bit more considerate about where you’re buying from, or how often you use something before you throw it away.”

O’Cathain nods in agreement. “And the show doesn’t end on a nihilistic note. It doesn’t end defeated,” she says. “It ends on a theme of community and care – what is care, and how do we care for each other, our environment and the world around us? How to take positive action within that, no matter how small, and how we reap the benefits of that. It reaches a crescendo of both mania and misery, and then it moves through that and goes somewhere else. We’re not trying to predict the future, and it’s not didactic – but there is a sense of ‘it’s not all over’, too.”

“I think it does ask the question, ‘What is possible?’” Clock says, smiling. “It’s not like we have the solution – but no one does. We just have to keep asking.”

Hothouse is at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, from Saturday September 9th to Saturday September 16th