PLAYING CUPID
Writer and performer Emer Dineen tells Liadán Hynes about her creative roots and the lockdown woes that inspired her genre-defying show to reconnect a lost generation
When Emer Dineen was in college at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, her friends would tease her about her devotion to being Irish, comparing her to the meme of Lady Gaga, in which the singer protests repeatedly: “I’m Italian, I’m Italian.”
“That was like me, but Irish. It’s actually embarrassing,” she says with a laugh. Both of her parents are originally from Cork. They were the first generation of their family to move out of Munster for “as far back as we could record”.
“The more I learn about my history and identity, the further away I feel from my voice, from this accent I have,” the 29-year-old says of her deep, mellifluous London tones. “That’s been an interesting thing to kind of analyse and accept about myself.”
We’re speaking via video call, and Dineen is sitting in the shed of her family’s south London home where she lives with her parents. There’s a sincerity to her answers. She laughs easily and often, but also pauses to consider regularly before answering, turning from the screen to look thoughtfully towards the bubbled glass panels in the brown wooden doors to her right, doors which look like something found in a million Irish homes in the 1980s.
Dineen’s family moved to London when she was a baby, but they came back and forth, spending summers in Cork. Her mother is Kate Corkery, a storyteller of Celtic mythology. “So the house is top to toe in Irish folklore books. My nan came to live with us until I was 16. She was called Mary, and was an amazing character.
“The house is still full of all of her Irish Catholic paraphernalia. She would chase me and my brother around the house, throwing holy water on us. She was so much fun. She’d h itch lifts to mass, from anyone. You’d see her getting into a weed-infused »
» boom-box Ford Fiesta outside the house. ‘Will ye take me to mass?’ She’d have a glass of sherry in one hand and the rosary in the other. She was fab.”
Dineen’s father is a Cork actor. “Was a Cork actor,” she says, turning to look toward the window. She is a full-time carer for her father, who has dementia.
“My brother’s a playwright, so we’re kind of all at it here. There’s something about being away from home. I mean, I call Cork home because my parents call it home. They pull this kind of Cork accent out of me as well that I used to have more as a child.
“I kind of oscillate between south London and sometimes Cork. It’s a real diaspora story.”
Her father started showing signs of dementia in 2019, but the family did not get an official diagnosis until about two years ago. She describes looking after him.
“He has less of a concept of time — of the future and past — so it puts more importance on the present. And you can make the present better by smiling or making a cup of tea. There’s something about caring for him... like how I get to see him watch his favourite film for the ‘first’ time. You know?
“While it’s painful and sad and confusing, it’s also...” she glances at that window again, “I’m grateful that I have this time with him, and get to be there to support him.”
Identity is key to Dineen’s latest work. The singer, songwriter, drag king and cabaret performer has written and will star in 0800 Cupid, the new theatrical production from the THISISPOPBABY events team. It’s exactly the kind of fare the production company, helmed by Philly McMahon (director of 0800 Cupid) and Jenny Jennings specialise in — an examination of the human condition, of love, connection and identity, by way of music, dance and performance.
“I like to start with what the audience can expect. Which is a big night out,” Dineen says when I ask her to describe the show.
“It’s part epic gig, part heartfelt theatre show, part call to action, and a kind of clarion call for reconnection in the modern day. It’s a 12-track, live song, spoken, danced, raved, insight into a generation that has grown up chronically online, a generation that’s been left disconnected by Covid, abandoned by financial structures, saturated with information, misinformation, hyper-information, and generally feels quite lost. While also kind of lolling and partying and finding communities and showing a huge amount of human resilience.”
Dineen has been working on the piece for several years. It came out of the feelings of disconnection and isolation that she found herself experiencing as we emerged from lockdown.
“What this show is talking about, at least from my perspective, is a kind of a spiritual crisis. There’s a thing called the meaning crisis. And the loneliness epidemic. There’s all of these things that I found within the internet.
“This sense of separated-ness, which is catalysed by social media, and saturated by the news and a lot of what young people, and people in general, are up against, financially, with the housing crisis. And also what’s happening with the world, with climate change.”
It can lead one to spiral exponentially, she points out. And we no longer have the grounding force of institutionalised religion.
“You see the rise of people finding rituals and practices within themselves — ice baths, breath work, star signs or, like, there’s also spiritual charlatans on the internet. And two-for-one on psychic reading at the shopping centre. There’s a yearning for a reconnection to oneness, or something beyond ourselves.”
Dineen spent the first portion of the pandemic living with a friend, the musical director of 0800 Cupid, Tom Beech, and the second half at home with her family.
Coming out of the pandemic, she was juggling being a full-time carer for her father and also being an artist, musician and cabaret performer in the evenings.
“A kind of dissonance between responsibilities at home and the fever of queer nightlife and expression led me to create this cabaret act — Cupid — from a
feeling of general disconnection coming out of the pandemic.
“I made Cupid this love god that was hungover and moulting and unsure of how to keep up with the zeitgeist. Because that was my perspective, coming back to normality after the pandemic — everything was abstracted.
“In the age of being saturated with noise and information, I was looking for something that I could trust in and believe in, and that is obviously always love and connection.”
She feels as though creating a character who was trying to understand love and connection in the modern age was almost putting a “provocation out into the world”, which meant “these difficult poetic incidents, started happening. Like accidentally eating a whole bar of [magic] mushroom chocolate and being by myself for 18 hours,” she says, dissolving into laughter at the memory of a real-life incident that is featured in the show.
There’s another burst of laughter when I later ask what she was like as a teenager.
“I was very hyperactive, and only stimulated by creative things. I was the same as a child — which I now understand to be ADHD. I couldn’t sit still in class. I was constantly making stuff. Or getting thrown out for talking too much. So to keep me out of trouble I was part of this programme, the Camden Roundhouse, it was like multidisciplinary theatre.”
There was a collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a show called The Dark Side of Love.
“That’s where I started experimenting with devising theatre and making music as well.”
She ended up performing one of her songs at The Royal Albert Hall, when still a teenager. She was spotted there by Tony Coleman of Hospital Records. He “asked if I was available for song writing and session work for electronic dance music. That’s where I started working in the music industry as a teenager and working as a songwriter and vocalist for drum and bass music, house music.”
Drama college followed school. “And since then, I’ve always being trying to find dynamic ways of fusing dance music and storytelling. And then finding queer expression through drag and cabaret.”
Having parents who are creatives helped her to follow that path herself.
“I owe it to my parents, really, managing to make it work as a storyteller and an actor,” she says. “They laid out that path that it’s possible to survive as an artist.
And they were so wholly supportive of any kind of mad ideas — and of me watching the musical Cats every night for seven years. Every night. I was just obsessed. I think that has a lot of to answer for, in terms of my love for camp.”
Her creative work has been a “vessel” in which to put “feelings and anxieties of growing up, and growing up in London, which is very fast-paced. There’s a lot to absorb and acclimatise to. Finding a vehicle for that was... I dunno what I’d do without it.”
She recently relistened to the first song she ever recorded with Hospital Records, Phase Us. It was about her experience of anxiety.
“I wrote it when I was really young. I listened back to it the other day and realised there’s elements of this that I’m echoing in the show — they both use art to cope and be hopeful. And using music to make sense of the world. Which is still what I’m doing now.”
Dineen’s work also reflects her immersion in queer culture.
Cupid, her character, is a drag king, as was DJ Duncan Disorderly, the role she played in THISISPOPBABY’s hit show Wake.
“Drag kings have been around for as long as drag queens, but they just haven’t been given as much exposure or opportunity. But you see so many people playing with the constructs of gender, and what defies a man or a woman. And satirising it or celebrating it.”
The description of 0800 Cupid I receive before our interview also mentions Dineen’s adult diagnosis of Tourette’s, which came when she was 26. “Luckily they’ve calmed down a lot. I maybe tic like four or five times a day. It’s called adult-onset tic disorder. They kind of started like shivers up my spine, and then moved into my neck and my voice and my right arm.
“It feels like driving a car for 26 years and then all of a sudden that car decided to do a wheelie and swerve off the road. It was a very, very abstract time, and I felt I kind of disconnected from my body.
“I didn’t know that you could get a tic disorder, or Tourette’s, as an adult. It definitely took a fair bit of processing. But I’m at a place with it now where, obviously my tics happen less — but if they do, I try to kind of listen to what it is that they’re trying to tell me.
“And I kind of feel empowered by the knowledge that my body is channelling a feeling that maybe my mind doesn’t know how to articulate.
“Or finding the kind of catharsis of it and moving with it instead of against it.”
The word authentic has been overused to the point where it begins to feel it no longer has any meaning. But Dineen feels like the real thing. She’s a disco ball made up of many mirrors but all sharing the same qualities — heartfelt communication, a magnificent performer, one who can bring an audience along with her, but with kindness and empathy underlying it all. Last year I was talking to McMahon, co-producer and director of Dineen’s new show, and he began talking about Dineen and what a talent she is. His whole face lit up as he described her. He knew what he was talking about. To say “voice of her generation” seems redundant in a multi-splintered world, but it seems a fair title for her. A voice worth listening to. l
‘0800 Cupid’ is part of Dublin Theatre Festival, September 26 October 5, at the Project Arts Centre. See thisispopbaby.com
I watched the musical ‘Cats’ every night for seven years. Every night. I was obsessed. I think that has a lot to answer for, in terms of my love of camp