New York theatre audiences needed a salve the week of the US presidential election — and in the Hell’s Kitchen district of the city the young Irish theatre company Malaprop were offering one. Their production Hothouse, at the Irish Arts Center, was earning serious plaudits. The New York Times called it an “alluringly strange and splangly” play, “a lament for the present and an elegy for the past that keeps alight a flame of hope for the future”.
Set on a cruise ship taking wealthy tourists to the North Pole “to say goodbye to the ice”, Carys D Coburn’s play stars Peter Corboy, Maeve O’Mahony, Bláithín Mac Gabhann, Ebby O’Toole Acheampong and, in what Vulture called a “subtly devastating” performance, Thommas Kane Byrne.
TKB, as the actor and writer is known in the industry, flipped between roles real and surreal, but it was his performance as Barbara — an Irish housewife and link in a chain of generational trauma in a story that maps the process of extracting herself from an abusive relationship on to the existential climate crisis — that was so restrained, so controlled, so loaded with pathos that it became a wonder in a play full of them.
Now TKB is about to bring the final part of his St Mary’s Mansions trilogy to the stage. It’s Always Your Bleedin’ Own, which opens shortly at Project Arts Centre in Dublin, follows Say Nothin’ to No One, from 2017, and Well That’s What I Heard, from 2018.
“I never fully intended to be a writer,” TKB says. “I fell into it in a sense. I think I was just quite lucky, in that there was a big space for authentic working-class work.” After all, he asks, who else was doing it “aside from Philly” — the playwright Phillip McMahon (who also runs Thisispopbaby with Jennifer Jennings). “Pineapple, Town Is Dead,” he says of two of McMahon’s plays, “those are very authentic glimpses into working-class life”.
TKB, who grew up in St Mary’s Mansions, on Seán MacDermott Street in Dublin’s north inner city, was a member of Belvedere Youth Club when he was brought to see Roddy Doyle’s adaptation of The Playboy of the Western World, starring Hilda Fay, at the Abbey Theatre. He later recalled that it was the first time he had heard his accent represented in such a context.
His Dublin 1 postcode, from which tremendous talents frequently emerge, often finds itself the subject of political debate, taskforce reports and top-down conversations. “It further hammers the us-and-them thing home,” TKB says. “Even the distribution of gardaí, they’re never around my area. When there’s a concert on [at Croke Park] they’re everywhere because God forbid something happens to the posh people on their way to a concert.
“I suppose, in all of my stuff, Dublin is a character in and of itself. I feel like my relationship with Dublin has changed since I wrote Say Nothin’ to No One.” How so? “I just don’t love it as much. It’s a strange feeling to be scared in your own city. I’m more comfortable walking around New York. I think there’s an energy, a nervousness in the air in Dublin. Nowhere is open. Everything feels quiet and ghostly. Dreadful Government, lack of nightlife, lack of cultural spaces.” He catches himself. “I feel like I’m making [the play] feel sombre, but it’s good craic as well.” He calls this final instalment of the trilogy a final bop.
The first time TKB gravitated towards writing was via “Facebook rants years ago”, he says. “I used that as my f**king diary. So embarrassing. Then people said I should write,” he says, almost instantly backtracking. “I’m scarlet I even said that. I literally have no f**king filter. I don’t mean that in a cute way. I meant that in a neurodivergent way.”
His biggest inspirations are Dublin city and women. “Women are always a huge part of my work. I feel like I owe a lot to women. I feel I’ve been made by them.” As a younger person, he says, he was insufferable. “I was mad into old Hollywood. Anything with Judy Garland, Bette Davis. I was so intense. I got that from my mam’s side of the family. They’d be big into old Hollywood movies. But then, I suppose, in terms of writers that inspired me, [Seán] O’Casey, Tennessee Williams.”
In the RTÉ crime drama Kin, TKB played Francis “Fudge” Flynn. He has appeared in Derry Girls, The Gone and The Dry. But it was the Virgin Media series Darklands, in which, vocally and physically transformed, he played Butsy, that his chameleon-like capacity and charisma caught the eye. The sinisterly gruff character, who glowered at bar counters and in balaclavas, was a brilliant turn, a universe away from the high-camp character TKB played in the 2021 film Deadly Cuts.
Another project he has on the go is with Gemma Dunleavy: they plan to turn He Sits of a Tuesday, the play they created about a local politician who never appears, into a musical. “I just think we come from a very similar place in our approach,” he says of the singer. “Although our work is a love letter to our home and the people in it, it’s not romanticising it in any way. We still are very much unflinching about it all, but focus on the beauty of it while staying true to the shit that goes on.”
It’s Always Your Bleedin’ Own is at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from Wednesday, December 4th, to Saturday, December 14th, with previews from Monday, December 2nd; the cast will also perform readings of Say Nothin’ to No One and Well That’s What I Heard on the afternoon of Saturday, December 7th
