In a 19th-century former post office on Dublin’s northside, two dancers are moving in tandem in front of a large mirror. Across from them the DJ Robbie Kitt sits at a pair of decks, mixing live music. A man’s voice can be made out amid the layers of sound as the dancers’ moves become slightly sexual.
Looking on are the writer and director Shaun Dunne, the director Claire O’Reilly and the actor Adam John Richardson – a familiar face from the recent RTÉ series The Dry – who together are part of the team making This Solution, which opens at Dublin Theatre Festival next week. Based in part on the experiences of an anonymous Irish man who worked in gay pornography, it blends fact, fiction and a sense of mystery.
Dunne is the young film- and theatremaker behind How to Tell a Secret, last year’s documentary based on his play Rapids, about people living with a HIV diagnosis in Ireland. He met the man, to whom he refers only as “the contributor”, a number of years ago through his work: their first conversations were about a project Dunne was developing about learning to dance as an adult. “As he and I developed a relationship over time, I got some insight into his experience navigating the gay porn world,” says Dunne. “And I wanted to find a way to create a play that we could stitch to that testimony.”
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It’s not necessarily an easy topic to relate to, he says; the play is about “finding a way to extract some of those themes, build something that’s separate but connected, and see where the murky area where we all exist is”. This has led to two things happening at once during the performance. “There’s a documentary layer and then the world of the play, and it exists through two studios that are joined by a mirror.”
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One of the studios is where Richardson’s character goes for a private dance class with a teacher played by the actor and choreographer Jessie Thompson. (Like the contributor, the characters are unnamed.) Behind its mirror is a porn studio – the world that the contributor eventually described to Dunne during a series of one-on-one interviews about his experience. “Over the course of the performance the contributor’s world is fed into the music” that the dancers in the class are dancing to, Dunne explains. “Eventually, both worlds start to become one.”
There’s an expectation as an actor to just smile and wave and arrive and do what you’re told. Whereas this is such a collaborative project
— Adam John Richardson, actor
Dunne has used testimony in his work before, but this time he’s doing so slightly differently: the contributor’s voice is layered with music that Kitt combines during each performance. “I needed banks of interview material that we could play with and mix, so we sat down and did face-to-face interviews,” says Dunne. “We’ve done around four two-hour sessions over a number of years. We have permission to use our contributor’s voice. However, we play with it a little bit… You won’t necessarily be able to identify his voice.”
That anonymity extends to the contributor not being available to talk to The Irish Times. Instead, we can tell his story only through Dunne’s words, and Dunne is careful how he talks about him. The contributor shot a number of gay porn scenes for a studio, he explains. But there was tension about whether he could change his mind about certain things, “so not wanting the material to be shared, changing their mind after the contract has been signed – obviously, being happy to participate on the day, but then your cooling-off period [doesn’t] happen. That was the tricky space that they found themselves in. And that was what I found very interesting. Not so much ‘How do we feel about porn?’ but ‘How do we feel about changing your mind when you’ve agreed to do something initially?’”
Dunne hopes the play will resonate with “people who have had difficult relationships, difficult employment terms, difficult situations in their working life that they haven’t been able to escape from”.
He says that when the pornography featuring the contributor reached Ireland, it amounted to a reckoning, and that the contributor felt shamed. This resonated with Dunne, who works with themes of shame and exile. “But what we’re really looking at is that space of change of heart, change of mind, and then that response, that feeling of being viewed,” he says, “that people aren’t able to detach you from something that maybe only took two weeks out of your life. That’s the nuts and bolts of the story, without giving too much away.” He regards his interviews with the contributor as “part of their moving forward”, but he cautions that one of the play’s themes is that art is not therapy.
Claire O’Reilly, his codirector, is a founder of Malaprop theatre company. (Her assured direction helped Hothouse, its most recent play, win the best production award at Dublin Fringe Festival last month.) She says she and Dunne were conscious of the assumptions people can make about subjects such as gay porn and shame. “So for me, in terms of why you want to make work, and why you give it your all, that’s a real reason to try and explore what is it about the Irish psyche, or what is it about this person’s story, that’s had that influence and that lasting impact,” she says, adding that the fictional world helps the play tease out themes in a way that’s visceral but also puts “a layer of separation between the contributor and how we access the story in, I think, a very useful way”.
Richardson says his character goes to the dance class because “he wants to get back into his body, back in touch with himself” after a tough experience. When he was researching the role he listened to the contributor’s testimony, but also spoke to other people who worked in the gay porn industry. “Obviously, I do want to know as much as possible of this story,” he says. “But I need to be respectful and just take what I’m given in that respect, and run with it. [But] there’s responsibility to do it justice.”
I think this is probably the most queer-focused piece I’ve ever done. It’s an all-queer cast. And that’s really exciting
— Shaun Dunne, writer and director
The care around the contributor’s identity is echoed in the team’s overall approach to creating the play. “There’s things that have happened in the world of our contributor’s experience that I’m really mindful about not happening again,” says Dunne. For example, “making sure that our contributor knows exactly what clips of the transcript we’re using: they have sign-off on that; they can change their mind”.
Richardson says it’s the first time he’s encountered such a focus on being able to change your mind in a rehearsal room. “There’s an expectation as an actor to just smile and wave and arrive and do what you’re told,” he says. “Whereas this is such a collaborative project.”
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The play is notable too because of its queerness. Everything Dunne works on “has a queer sensibility because of who I am”, he says. “But I think this is probably the most queer-focused piece I’ve ever done. It’s an all-queer cast. And that’s really exciting.” But that comes with its own pressures; as he notes, “we put ourselves as artists under tremendous, tremendous pressure and expectation”.
For Richardson it’s a particularly meaningful role because it’s only his second time playing a gay character. It’s easy to assume that, since the marriage equality referendum, there’s been a wider landscape for queer and gay actors, but that isn’t always the case. While this role is layered with difficult themes, it’s also a space for representation. “I was told I’ll never ‘play gay’ even though I am gay,” says Richardson. “So whenever I get a chance to dive into the queer world I’m, like, ‘Let’s go!’”
This Solution is at Project Arts Centre, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from Wednesday, October 11th, to Sunday, October 15th
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