Emmet Kirwan is built for speed

In the Hairy Lemon pub in Dublin, actor and writer Emmet Kirwan has taken out his smartphone and is scrolling through his Spotify to show me his favourite music choices, flicking between tracks from Kendrick Lamar to Hare Squead to Souls of Mischief to a bunch of songs by obscure international artists even their mothers would be hard-pressed to name.

The varied reference points are not surprising in a way. Kirwan has always taken his influences from outside the obvious pack, forging a singular path evident in his electric spoken-word contribution to Riot, a mixed-genre highlight of the Dublin Fringe Festival some months back, and Dublin Oldschool, a 70-minute two-hander about a pair of troubled brothers, written by and co-starring Kirwan.

At 36, Kirwan is big-eyed, thin and haunting-looking, happy to chat, but sometimes with a nervous energy to him, and a conversational palette that ranges easily between the high-brow and the trivial.

Raised in Tallaght, Kirwan knew from an early age that he would follow a more artistic path than his parents, who work as a taxi driver and in the Credit Union.

“My brother went to art school and I went to Trinity to study drama. We were the first generation who were afforded that opportunity,” he says.

The seeds of Kirwan’s interest in theatre were sown young, when he began attending Dublin Youth Theatre at 15. “It was great, it’s kind of the anti-drama school,” Kirwan says. “They take in kids from all over Dublin, working and middle-class backgrounds, so for the first time I was meeting kids from different areas. They allowed you to write your own plays or direct them.”

It was at Dublin Youth Theatre that Kirwan met Phillip McMahon, who directed Dublin Oldschool and Riot, both notable for their streetwise blend of intellect, comedy and passion.

As a writer, you’re asked to do a lot for free. But I can’t pay my landlord with kudos

In an impressive development for Kirwan, Dublin Oldschool will be staged at the National Theatre in London this month, and will return to stages in Dublin and Belfast in February. Kirwan is also in the process of adapting the piece for film, alongside Warrior Films and MDV Films, who made some of the Kodaline music videos. “I’m writing it at the moment,” he says. “We’re going to make it ourselves, and there’s another film company coming in that’s going to help us along.”

The play deserves the attention. Geared towards a young audience, it plays out like an exhilarating love letter to Dublin, with reference points from the Liberties to Andrew’s Lane included, alongside a bristling soundtrack.

The plot tells of wannabe DJ Jason, played by Kirwan, and his heroin addict brother, played by Ian Lloyd Anderson. As Kirwan describes: “Over a particularly mental lost weekend, this character Jason, who is on a downward trajectory, bumps into his brother, who he hasn’t seen in three years, and they reconnect over a weekend. It’s told through hip-hop – the opening seven or eight minutes is all in verse, set to hip-hop beats – and then through a mixture of duologues, theatre between the brothers, and a healthy dose of spoken word poetry.”

Although his creative life is flourishing, Kirwan is candid about how difficult it is to survive as a theatre practitioner: he rents an apartment in Temple Bar with his girlfriend, and worries about the prospect of landlords raising rents. “As a writer, you’re asked to do a lot for free,” he says. “It’s mental. If anyone asks you to do anything for free, tell them: ‘I can’t pay my landlord with kudos’.”

Kirwan makes his living through doing a variety of different jobs, moving easily between voiceover work, writing and acting roles – you may have seen him in the powerful prose poetry video Just Saying, written and directed by Dave Tynan, which has received almost half a million views on YouTube, or in the Gate’s production last year of Juno and the Paycock, directed by Mark O’Rowe.

You’d wonder if Kirwan is one of the writers who the new Abbey directors, Neil Murray and Graham McLaren, will be looking at, with a view towards developing his career on the stage of the national theatre. Kirwan hasn’t had a meeting with them yet. “But they’re great,” he says. “They’ve met lots of people, so that’s a whole new thing even in itself. They’re listening to people; they want to know what’s going on. I’d love to do Dublin Oldschool or something new even.”

In Kirwan’s view, Irish theatre needs to change to adapt to the new speed evident in mainstream media, when events move at greater pace than previously. “Theatre’s job in the past was to reflect our society,” he says. “Juno and the Paycock was written 18 months after the Civil War. There was a prescience to the things they were talking about – they were on the nose. But new plays now can take up to five years to be staged.

“The pace of our society is speeding up. Our theatre needs to ramp up. Theatre is a place that can be subversive and dissident. It has a role to play in challenging the narrative of government and writing stories about people that you won’t get anywhere else.” �

Dublin Oldschool runs at the Project Arts Centre from February 3 to February 18 – for more details, see projectartscentre.ie