This March marks the opening of theatre company THISISPOPBABY’s 15-year anniversary programme with its headlining production of Australian playwright Patricia Cornelius’ SHIT, starring Kate Stanley Brennan, Aisling O’Mara and Nicky Lewis as the play’s three downtrodden women, Billy, Bob and Sam. After having planned its opening night for March 12th 2020, SHIT picks up right where the company left off before the pandemic, nearly 15 years to the day that Danny & Chantelle premiered in the same venue. In light of this, The University Times spoke to Jennifer Jennings, the co-founder and co-director of THISISPOPBABY and director of SHIT, which premieres at Project Arts Centre in March.
Notably marking the first time THISISPOPBABY has produced an existing play, Jennings reminisces on the inspiration behind her production of SHIT as being catalysed by seeing it in Sydney in 2017. She notes, “I was riveted, but the thing that struck me very profoundly was that it sounded like an Irish play”. She continues, mentioning that it is “quite a dark play, with really biting comedy running through it and its language is athletic and nearly virtuosic in its cursing in particular”, which prompted her to imagine what an Irish production might feel like. Questioning, in Jennings’ words “what it is to be a woman in this world when you’re dealt a particularly bad hand”, the technical approach behind the production is intensely physical, stemming from her “absolute love of the poetry, humour and absurdity of the physical vernacular of the streets of Dublin”, placing a distinct emphasis on how Dubliners move in “a specific and exaggerated way” throughout their interactions.
After having procured the rights for an Irish production of the play, Jennings and choreographer Philip Connaughton began working on how to layer this piece over the landscape of Dublin city. Strikingly, in this process, Jennings stresses that “class becomes quite prominent over and above gender” in this play which concerns itself with both issues. She explains that “the social inequalities work in a very different way in Ireland than they do in Australia” so the audience would imagine the three female protagonists “as somewhere on the homeless spectrum”, which in itself becomes “associated with all sorts of things including drug use” in Dublin. This rapidly made this process of transposition overly specific, prompting Jennings to “take a step back” and produce the setting of “an imagined Dublin”.
Having fallen pregnant at the beginning of lockdown, or as Jennings shrewdly puts it, “two weeks after the world ended”, the theatre-maker was afforded the opportunity to be able to “luxuriate in some deep thinking and deeper research than [she] is usually able to in the fast-paced life of a theatre company”. While this translates to a development process for SHIT being largely based in Jennings’ head, she recalls needing to “find a new impulse to do the show”. Despite the digression that “this is going to sound silly but it’s true,” Jennings stresses the impact of the Taliban invasion of Afghanistan and the imposition of the Texas abortion ban in late 2021 as having “angered [her] back into this play in its primacy, which is about how devastatingly shit women’s lives can be compared to other groups of society”.
Jennings characterises SHIT as being “absolutely ferocious” in itself, as well as being “funny and filthy”. Citing Cornelius’ “brilliant” writer’s note at the beginning of the playtext for SHIT which highlights that “there’s not a single moment when these three young women transcend their ugliness … they’re mean, downmouthed, downtrodden, hard-bit, utterly damaged women”, Jennings stresses its importance for directing this production, noting that “despite this note, we still connect to these characters massively as human beings – that is the beauty of the play”. In this sense, because audiences are rarely faced with “really shocking, unlikeable women as our protagonists” as well as the fact that the play touches on everything “that could happen to a woman who has gone through an institutional social system”, Jennings asserts that “it feels very active in terms of where to put your anger”.
Audiences can expect, according to Jennings, “to laugh a lot, in that uncomfortable way when they are not sure exactly why they are laughing” as well as “to be very moved and to be chewing over it for a while in their minds and in conversations afterwards”. Ultimately, she stresses that, despite its “buckle-up” nature, “it is such a well-constructed play that the way it unfolds in front of an audience is excellent and beautiful”.
THISISPOPBABY’s production of Patricia Cornelius’ SHIT runs from March 2nd to 5th at Project Arts Centre. Tickets can be purchased on the THISISPOPBABY website.
