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Co-Directors Phillip McMahon and Jennifer Jenning
s on their formative years and what they led to, the power of the dancefloor, and the state of the city today. “We’ve always talked about creating a dynamic city that’s a good place to come home to, and we’ve always been interested in making work that makes home a better place to be in.” At a time when Dublin feels like it’s sitting on an existential brink, at a precipice beyond which things feel unknown but certainly different, this is welcome reassurance from Phillip McMahon, for anyone who worries for the future and the welfare of the capital. Dublin has been jostled into its current dysfunctional position – socially, culturally and politically – by the irreconcilable differences of market forces and human need; the innate tension between the two at times producing violent outcomes for city and citizen alike. Big questions hang heavy, casting shadows and asking of the place and its inhabitants: what it is, what it wants to be, and who it is for? These grand questions are hardly new. McMahon and his co-director, Jennifer Jennings know that well. Taking the city as their set, star and source text, they’ve interrogated identity, belonging, community, the past and the present, and the idea of ‘progress’ and who it’s really for, since founding ThisIsPopBaby in 2006. When Dublin seems to be losing its heart, in ‘boom’ times or in bust, they’ve helped find a pulse. “Dublin has been a central character in all of ThisIsPopBaby’s work. All that it does feeds into and has been a response to the city,” says Jennings. “It’s not just important to us as citizens, it’s vital to us as a theatre company. But it’s in a pretty disastrous place at the moment. You can feel that the city wants to find its groove again and we’re determined to be part of that conversation.” As apocryphal as it may sound, the pair would only meet after a series of near misses throughout the ‘90s and early ‘00s: as members of Dublin Youth Theatre; as ravers in the same clubs; and as emigrants living in the same suburb of the same city in Australia. “It was going to happen one way or another,” says McMahon. Prior to that, Jennings had been “going along one particular route in life before a massive disruption during my teenage years spun me out of the mainstream.” She would leave home while she was still in school, rediscovering that home, and “the beginnings of my whole life philosophy on the dancefloors of extraordinary clubs like Elevator, run by Tonie Walsh and Niall Sweeney.” Meanwhile, McMahon applied to drama school in England, going through the motions but with limited success. Returning to Dublin, an “apprenticeship of sorts” saw him “hanging around the fringes of bigger companies and doing small parts in the Abbey.” Frustrated with the “lack of agency” a young actor has over their career, he took control, saying: “If people won’t give us the main parts then I’ll write ourselves into the main parts.” The result was Danny and Chantelle (Still Here), a story about friendship set over one night of clubbing in Dublin, starring himself and Georgina McKevitt, which premiered in 2006 at the Dublin Fringe. Jennings, fresh from a master’s in UCD was keen to find a type of theatre missing in Dublin. Specifically, she says, one which occupied a “creative space between underground culture, with excellent standards of high art, alongside elements of pop-culture and counter-culture.” She found it Rory O’Neill It’s not a stretch to say that Phillip and Jenny changed my life. I owe them an enormous amount both personally and professionally – but I don’t think of them as professionals! Because working with them doesn’t feel like work. They’ve somehow managed to create an alternative hyper-colourised universe where you hang out with your weird best mates, conjuring up craic on the roll-over and waking up with glitter in your crevices – and then someone pays you for it and you feel guilty because this is your actual job. But that’s only how it feels, because in truth they aren’t playing. They are smart, creative, thoughtful, hard-working, brilliant, do-ers, who are unbound by convention and make genre-hopping work that pulls off that magic thing of being both important and serious in intent, while also being entertaining and fun and seeming effortless. And they aren’t afraid to dream big, and never seem to run out of ideas or energy or projects. To be honest, they’re exhausting! Phillip likes to tell the story that, one night in 2006, full of Dutch (Gold) courage, he went up to Panti in a club on Dame Street and said he wanted to make a show with her, and she turned around and said: “Who the fuck are you?” I can’t vouch for the veracity of that story because I don’t like to remember things, but if it is true, he must have had a good answer because we did make a show together (and many more after that one). But of course Phillip always has a good answer, so I’m inclined to believe the story is true. And if it was Jenny telling the story, I wouldn’t dare doubt her. Left: Danny and Chantelle (still here) Above: Phillip McMahon and Jennifer Jennings in Werk in McMahon’s play, and McMahon and Jennings finally found each other. With the pair now working together, it became apparent that Jennings wasn’t the only one who was looking for what Danny and Chantelle (Still Here) represented. Born in the nightclubs, a nascent community soon emerged around ThisIsPopBaby, drawn to, and rallying around a shared ambition to test and challenge what theatre can be, do and say. “We’ve maintained that spirit of meeting someone on the dancefloor at 2am, where you say, ‘Yeah, I”m going to call you tomorrow even though we’ve just met,’” McMahon says. “Many of us found each other because we were suburban rats, escaping our whatever lives,” he continues. “Whether there was trauma there, or if it was just downright banal, we were all escaping into the city centre to dis23