Marty Breen, writer of and performer in BITCH, a drag cabaret show performed for Dublin Fringe at Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, discussed their recent performance with the University Times. Breen graduated from the Lir in 2018, and is a member of Broad Strokes Improv, an all-women and non-binary improv group. BITCH was nominated for and won several awards at the Dublin Fringe Awards, including a Best Performer Award for Breen.
BITCH was developed at Fringe Lab – is the concept you began with very different to what you’re now staging?
The play was a baby in my mind for a few years. What I applied with was a full comedy, in the form of a stand-up guy, who’s our drag king, doing stand-up at a mic in sections in between our drag queen, who’s a cabaret singer. Both two Comedy Club characters. She can only sing and play at the piano, and he does stand-up at the mic. I thought that it could remain a comedy all the way through, even though what I was talking about was quite heavy material.
I had always known where I wanted that story to go. But in writing, I got to a point where something happens in the play, and I had to eventually have a meeting with Fringe. going, “I’m very worried, because I applied with a full comedy.” It became something quite different. The form of the play kind of dissolves, and it becomes something else, which leaves the audience with questions of what they were laughing at before. The themes are heavy, but the point of the show is that it is a comedy. There’s a line I like that’s a refrain in it, which is, ‘you have to laugh or you might die.’
There’s also the kind of blurred line of- are they different characters or is it one person processing something that happened? She says in the first song, ‘Welcome to the dog fight bitches.’ And it is that. It’s competing for the audience’s complicity and approval, and whose side they’re on in what becomes kind of the same story.
The whole point is we want the audience to come and really be there for a good time. It’s not that we want to pull the wool over their eyes, but I think people are at their most vulnerable when they’re laughing. That’s when you can gut punch them, because it’s the very same things that they were laughing at that are the things that break their heart. I think that’s proven so much in comedy, and it’s why I love that form. So yeah, it’s very different to what I originally applied with in a way. The concept and the form and the story are all the same, but I realised it takes such a different turn and kind of becomes a different experience for the audience about halfway through.
BITCH is a drag cabaret show, and focuses on queer experience. What are your thoughts on the intersections between queer culture and theatre and how do you think BITCH incorporates these intersections?
BITCH, for me, is a real love letter to specifically queer and underbelly theatre. It happens to be a play that is hung on comedy, which is not stand-up; stand-up is still not really considered an art form, even though it absolutely is. It’s such a space of subversiveness and social commentary, which I think is inherently queer. And then cabaret is, I think, the queerest art form. If you go back to its roots, it has always been a revolt against more traditional theatre and more traditional ideas. So putting those both on stage and then hanging them on the structure of a play was really what interested me, and is everything I love about theatre. The fact that I’m doing drag and playing both characters, you couldn’t do that in film, you couldn’t do that anywhere else, is what makes it a really live experience that couldn’t exist anywhere else.
In terms of queer experiences, this [our Bitch Character] is a person who has a lot of internalised misogyny and homophobia, and actually, so does our stand-up guy. But there’s nothing explicit that the world taught them. There’s no character that made them feel this way. There’s no part of their story that they can point to and go, ‘Oh, that’s why I am the way I am. That’s why I treat people badly,’ or, ‘That’s why I punch down,’ or ‘That’s why I behave in a certain way.’ So it’s kind of asking those unanswerable questions of nature vs nurture, but more so how do you separate yourself from your experiences, and what do you do with them? Do you take it out on other people? Is it easier to punch down than face the thing that you can’t really see? This structure or this brainwashing [laughs] that we’ve all allowed ourselves to believe, that, how bad things are is how bad things need to be. That we’ve resigned ourselves to that because it’s easier to resign yourself than to look at the huge rot and poison in the very foundations of the society that we live in. Because they’re really hard to point at.
What BITCH is really looking at is this chicken and egg thing. Do your experiences inform who you become, how you treat other people? How do you divorce them from that? How can you ever know who you really are, separate to the world you’ve grown up in, or the things that have happened to you? Are you what you’re made, or are you fundamentally a bad person, in this case?
One of the big things that I have been poking out with the show is everyone knows somebody who has experienced the themes in the show.The thing that Bitch goes through, everyone does. But very few people would say they know, would admit they know, or would want to admit to themselves that they know and love somebody who does what our stand up guy does. And I think that’s part of the problem, that we can’t have that conversation. Because it’s awful. No one wants to admit that. No one wants to have those conversations. Why would you? It’s seeing a problem that you want to pretend isn’t there. But the problem is still there, there’s still people walking around like Bitch. She has a whole section at the end talking about the shadow on her back, this thing that she has to carry that was given to her by somebody else and that she’ll never know who she is with or without it.
