Kilkenny Arts Festival 2024: In Trade/Mary Motorhead, O’Halloran uses music to explore a transactional relationship between two men and also to transcend the confines of a prison cell
Emma O’Halloran: ‘Why do all the women die in opera? I really wanted to do something that’s not that’
“For me, having very little experience of opera,” she says, “my initial impression of opera was that they tend to be very violent towards women. And why do all the women die? I thought, I really just want to do something that’s not that.”Look inside the most expensive house sold in Dublin so far this year‘With Mary Motorhead I was writing maybe 12-16 hours a day. So I did feel like I was in a jail cell myself.
O’Halloran decided to do it as a monodrama. “I also thought, through my absolute ignorance – you know, the sort of Dunning-Kruger effect – ‘How hard can writing an opera be or an opera libretto be? I’ll do it myself.’ I messaged Mark and asked if he would mind ‘if I kind of messed around with this play of yours’? He emailed it to me and said ‘Best of luck!’”, whose reputation she knew as a highly dramatic presence, and who performs cabaret as well as opera.
“But it has that effect of freezing moments in time for me. So, you know, if I hear a piece of music from the 1990s, I’ll remember where I was at the time and the smell of sun cream or whatever. I started to think, what if Mary was like that? So I picked random pieces of pop music, sampled in a way that they’re so distorted you wouldn’t really know what pieces they are. I used them almost like transportation vehicles to get her out of the cell.
Emma O'Halloran: 'I’m one of those people who, if I hear a song that I like, I’ll listen to it, like, 1,000 times, until I hate it and never want to hear it again.' Photograph: Alex Dowling Trade, which in its original form won an Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for best new play of 2011, is set in a small shabby room in a bed and breakfast in Dublin’s north inner city. The two characters are an 18-year-old rent boy and his much older client. “There’s a lot of pauses, like awkward silences, because there’s two men who have never really communicated in that way with anybody else. You’re talking about people who find it really hard to express themselves.
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