New play captures life as a lap dancer in Celtic Tiger Ireland

Mirjana Rendulic’s play Broken Promise Land is based on her mostly happy experiences of dancing in the clubs of Celtic Tiger Dublin, she tells Caomhán Keane

MIRJANA Rendulic’s play, Broken Promise Land, a fictionalised account of her life as a lap dancer in Ireland, opened last week in the TheatreUpstairs. Rendulic says the one-woman show, directed by Aoife Spillane-Hinks, is not about victims, but about choices. “It’s about lap dancing and the immigrant experience, but it’s also about a girl growing up. She’s not a tragic martyr, she’s just a girl with a mission.”

Rendulic came to Ireland from Croatia in 2003. To pay college fees of €10,000, she became a lap dancer. When a friend read what she had written about her experiences, he put her in contact with Hinks. “I was really intrigued by people talking about immigrants in Ireland,” Hinks says, “because I am the descendant of people who left Ireland and worked as servants in Boston. I was fascinated by how lap dancers were seen here as sainted symbols of exploitation. I loved that this character was a spunky young woman who hadn’t been tricked or forced.” Some people will bristle at lap dancing being presented subjectively. “Theatre changes the world by humanising people we don’t ordinarily hear from. You spend an hour with this character and you go ‘I know a bit more about the world, and her journey to find a place in it’.”