On 30 May 2021 This American Life aired an interview between radio and podcast giant, Ira Glass (the show’s co-founder) and stand-up comedian and actor, Rob Delaney. They talk about the death of Rob’s child Henry. Henry died shortly before his 3rd birthday.
I am struck by the visceral honesty with which Rob talks about his grief. His language punches the listener in the gut and rightly so given the subject. ‘The day my son died,’ he says, ‘I hit myself in the face. I couldn’t believe my baby had died and I punched myself in the nose.’ He says this straightforwardly but with disbelief and horror.
The gift to those who hear this interview is Rob’s way of offering them an insight into something so appalling using his brilliantly brutal communication style. This is his art form.
Rob Delaney’s work most familiar to me is the television show Catastrophe in which he, and co-creator Sharon Horgan, sear with surgical precision to the heart of day-to-day life in a way that is frighteningly and hilariously relatable. They show us our lives using all the gory, real, terrifying, sad, and funny moments that happen while building families, careers, life-partnerships, and marriages. To do this they must have an uncanny insight into what we all feel, think, and say to each other in our darkest and most intimate moments. Then, they must be brave enough to write it, act it and hope it’s funny. It is very funny.
You can listen to Ira talking to Rob on thisamericanlife.org. The episode is called Good Grief! and its purpose is to recognise and explore what will be one of the most insurmountable and protracted traumas of the COVID-19 pandemic – grief and loss. At the time of writing 3.7 million people have died of Coronavirus globally. One of the ways through which we will learn how to understand, grasp, grieve, remember and live with this will be through the telling of the story by artists of all disciplines.
Essential workers are the heroes of the COVID-19 pandemic – we thank and celebrate them. I wonder though if enough attention has been paid to the invisible heroes who are ever-present in our lives? They are hanging on our walls, stacked in our bookcases, projected from our televisions, singing from our speakers and, for a while at least, transmitting into our homes from closed, audience-less theatres.
Visual artists, comedians, actors, dancers, writers, directors and musicians give us a perspective on life and in doing so help us to understand it better.
With a team of excellent people covering a range of professional areas I run a theatre; the Watergate Theatre in Kilkenny, Ireland. When the pandemic hit, our sector was the first to be shut down. We are an indoor venue in which hundreds of people gather several times per week and sit together for long periods of time. This is the virus’s utopia. From his podium in Washington DC on 12 March 2020 Leo Varadkar, the then Taoiseach, instructed that indoor mass gatherings of more than 100 people be cancelled with immediate effect. At the Watergate Theatre we were due to welcome a full house – nearly 330 people – in a matter of hours. Calling off this event was the beginning of an avalanche of similar cancellations and postponements.
In the weeks after we were shut down, we grappled with how to stay relevant if we could not show live work to an audience. One of the key questions was, ‘how can the Watergate, continue to fulfil its remit to support professional artists to do their essential work?’
I thought the question would be best answered by asking artists themselves, so I reached out to Medb Lambert and Donal Gallagher, artistic directors of award-winning, Kilkenny based theatre company, Asylum. Together and with the support of partners (Olga Barry, Maura O’Keeffe, and Anna Galligan) we collaborated to create Write Here, Right Now an open call, playwright commission.
Aside from its own intrinsic success, measurable not least by the vast number of entries, this process provided an insight into the quality of work happening throughout Kilkenny – and further afield – and how artists were already at work, through their writing, trying to understand what we are all living through.
This dark period has allowed us to evolve our partnerships with many professional artists. Monkeyshine Theatre Company, one of the Watergate’s 2021 artists in residence, makes work with a focus on the human relationship with the earth. Their prescience is typical of many artists. They are driven to make work which is stimulated by what they intuit, what they draw from the zeitgeist and find urgently needs to be explored and communicated. The question they are asking their audience is ‘what story is the earth telling you?’ You can read more about it on watergatetheatre.ie or monkeyshine.ie.
Another Watergate commission from the early lockdown period is ‘Time’ by Philip Cullen. It’s a series of 6 short films and is a beautiful focus on the unstoppable, forward momentum of the natural world and how it triumphs over the virus’s attempt to cull human life and spirit. It can be viewed here.
Christine Scarry 2021 Writer in Residence at the Watergate, Cindy Cummings 2021 Associate Artist at the Watergate and Equinox Theatre Company at KCAT in Callan, are all in the incubation or presentation phase of work supported by the Watergate. This work is pushing culture forward, reflecting the societal temperature and keeping a focus on diversity, purpose, and authenticity.
The Watergate is proud to have a role in the support of these artists. We hope that one of the silver linings of the pandemic is the opportunity it has given us to slow down and remember the role of the artist in documenting day-to-day life from a unique perspective. We are grateful to them for this and think of them as essential workers.
The work supported by the Watergate Theatre is funded by Kilkenny County Council and The Arts Council of Ireland – the former maintained at the level of previous years and the latter increased in 2021. All the work mentioned above can be viewed by visiting the Watergate Theatre website.
About Joanna Cunningham
Joanna Cunningham, who is from Co. Kildare, Ireland is the Executive Director of the Watergate Theatre in Kilkenny, Ireland. Joanna graduated from University College Cork with a Bachelor of Music before moving on to the University of Limerick where she graduated with a MA in Music with a focus on its social psychology and therapeutic potential.
She has worked at the Watergate Theatre since January 2018. Before this she ran the Music Programme at Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford and before this she worked as Deputy Director of Waterford Healing Arts Trust at Waterford University Hospital. Joanna ran a community arts programme in Ballyfermot, Dublin for the first eight years of her career post MA.
The Watergate Theatre contributes to ensuring that Kilkenny is in line with an Ireland which believes that each citizen’s life should be enriched by arts and culture. Within this mission Joanna aims to create opportunities for the local community to engage in high quality arts experiences while working with artists to create these opportunities. Through her work Joanna aims to support the development of the arts locally and to build partnerships through which the Watergate works alongside members of Kilkenny’s artistic and non-artistic communities. Joanna aims to increase the depth of engagement by all community sectors with a particular focus on children and young people.