A few years ago the actor, comedian and superbly dry wit Sonya Kelly decided to create her own work and turned to herself for inspiration. "I didn't necessarily want to write a play with a cast and doorbells ringing and letters arriving and things like that," she says. Instead she had become absorbed in the thrilling intimacy of monologuists, such as the American performer Spalding Gray and the English activist comic Mark Thomas, as well as podcasts such as The Moth and This American Life, founts of autobiographical stories. "Sometimes I listen to something on the radio and think, I'd pay 15 quid to hear that," she says.
Gray's monologue Swimming to Cambodia, his account of acting in The Killing Fields and being transformed by the experience, was a particular touchstone. "A big-picture-little-picture narrative where there's a physical journey, a metaphysical journey, and someone becoming politicised by the road they were on," she says. "It really blew me away."
On the surface, Kelly's own story of a myopic Irish childhood may not have seemed quite as potent. "And so it was discovered why I'd thrown bread to the floating crisp packets in our local pond and walked into lamp posts and said, excuse me," she reported in The Wheelchair on My Face, her 2011 show, which Fishamble theatre company staged. Yet, as an amusing and endearingly clear-sighted depiction of 1980s Ireland, it travelled the nation and then a significant portion of the world, finding a Fringe First award in Edinburgh, a New York Times critic's pick in Manhattan and an appreciative conference of ophthalmologists in Killarney.
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It added to a growing trend on the Tiger Dublin Fringe of performers mining their lives for material. Megan Riordan's Luck, a true account of growing up among professional gambling circles in Las Vegas, is a well-travelled example from 2008, as is Noelle Brown's investigation of her own adoption in last year's Postscript. For those performers still hiding behind fictions and characters, such charming successes proved the benefits of making a show of yourself.
This year Kelly returns to the fringe with another autobiographical solo piece – and she is not alone. These days everybody has a story to tell.
It begs a few questions, though. Is everyone’s story worth telling? Do performers have an ethical responsibility for how they depict others? And, when the endless “sharing” of social media has rendered privacy largely obsolete, is there a danger of becoming overexposed?
Guilty history
The branches of Oddie Braddell's family tree have been traced before, in a self-published book by the actor's father entitled Twigs from the Family Hedge. Braddell, working with Megan Riordan as his director, has given the story another title: Bastard: A Family History. This bitter legacy stretches from the story of Bloody Braddell of Drogheda, an officer in Oliver Cromwell's army who "slaughtered half of Drogheda", to John Waller Braddell, a land agent during the Famine who performed the highest number of evictions and was assassinated in 1862. "So, yeah . . ." deadpans Bradell, whose round tones, acquired at boarding school in Britain, have never been easily traced back to his native Donegal. "Bit of a bastard."
Bradell’s show is a comedy about finding his place in Ireland, yet he speaks about this history with a reservoir of guilt. If the show uses personal reflection to stand in for a bigger subject, it is that of genetic inheritance, the shaping force of history and the burden of destiny. “I’m trying to say that history does inform who we are, but it doesn’t have to define us,” says Braddell.
But one wonders how raw a confessional performance ought to be. Braddell, who believes in vulnerability and honesty while staying alert to the risk of public therapy, is touching on the death of his mother and his father’s desertion of the family, and those wounds do not seem healed. “To be honest, my dad doesn’t know about the show,” he says. “I’m not ready to tell him yet.”
Kelly's new performance for Rough Magic, How to Keep an Alien, also deals with the story of others, primarily her Australian partner, Kate, and their struggle to secure her an Irish visa. "It required permission," says Kelly. "Also, you have a huge responsibility to people who don't want to be included in the story and to people's families and how you portray them."
Discovering those parameters can bring focus to the piece, Kelly says, together with some necessary creative licence. “If you try to tell it as real as possible, it doesn’t have that plot-point punch.” Entwined with the fraught tale of her partner’s ancestors who emigrated from Ireland 150 years ago, it allows the story to encompass something bigger than themselves.
Neil Douglas's mother likes to joke that she should have a walk-on part in her son's performance. Some will find it strange that she doesn't have the starring role. We Didn't Care When (Our Mothers Had Cancer) is Douglas's response to his mother's battle against the disease and his own ambivalent feelings as a teenager. If that sounds alarmingly self-centred, it may be the point. As a former member of Dublin Youth Theatre, which has steadily come to embrace contemporary theatre methods, Douglas discovered a practice of creating work about his direct experiences. He is working here with Shane Byrne, another former member of Dublin Youth Theatre, who has performed three autobiographical shows for THEATREclub.
“Seeing that helped shape me as an artist,” says Douglas. “When I come to talk about these things I kind of just start with myself.” Douglas readily identifies with the selfie generation. “Our relationship to privacy is a strange one. It’s been moulded and shaped by the amount of social media that we have. I think learning how to negotiate that is part of being a young person. When it comes to art, part of working in this way is trying to figure out how much is okay to say.”
It can still be disconcerting how little his mother features in the conversation. “In a strange way it’s not really about my mum,” Douglas says. “It’s about cancer.” That might be enough to avoid the worst risk of the autobiographical show – the trap of solipsism – and retain the more curious, empathic qualities of art, to reach for a subject outside oneself.
Adjusting the privacy settings
Caitríona Ní Mhurchú’s journey, for instance, used a personal experience as a springboard, when she was racially abused on the 123 bus for speaking in another language. She was speaking Irish. At around the same time somebody won a national radio competition for describing his time-travelling fantasy: journeying to the late 19th century to push Peig Sayers off a cliff before her dour autobiography was ever written. Ní Mhurchú felt a sense of kinship with the detested woman: she grew up near Peig’s birthplace in Dún Chaoin, by the Blasket Islands, and didn’t speak English until the age of five, when her family moved to Sutton. “You’re a complete outsider, even though you’re supposed to be the insider,” she says. “You’re really in a constant shape of flux. You’re never right, wherever you are.”
Ní Mhurchú's show, Eating Seals and Seagulls' Eggs, was initially going to be a reappraisal of Peig, without involving Ní Mhurchú's story at all. She has only introduced herself, with some reticence, "where my story intersects with Peig Sayers in some way. I was really keen that it wasn't a personal story. I was trying to remove myself from it."
Ní Mhurchú has even retained another actor, Louise Lewis, to play her onstage. “I don’t speak my own words at all,” she says happily. “I don’t get my own biography.”
That may be a necessary adjustment to the privacy settings of autobiographical performance. “I’ve been to performances where I’ve felt the performer is very much in control of what they reveal,” says Ní Mhurchú, “and performances where it has been quite unnerving. They haven’t considered the full impact, either on themselves or the work.” Her own self-portrait comes via a hall of mirrors; transforming and mediating the facts.
The autobiographical show is a two-way street, in which we see ourselves in others while performers recognise others in themselves. “What I’ve learned from memoir,” says Kelly, “is that it’s as much about reminding the audience of their own experiences as telling them about yours. Sometimes you look out and see heads nodding. If you’re just going, This about me, you alienate them; it becomes emotionally intangible. The personal story is always a seed for a bigger landscape. The ripple effect is much more important than the pebble hitting the water.”
How to Keep an Alien runs September 4th-13th, Bastard: A Family History September 6th-12th and Eating Seals and Seagulls' Eggs September 14th-20th, all at Project Arts Centre. We Didn't Care When (Our Mother Had Cancer) runs September 15th-20th at Smock Alley Theatre; fringefest.com
