Danti-Dan, teenage years, and happy days by the River Lee
Gina Moxley, writer of Danti Dan and The Patient Gloria. Picture: Miki Barlok
Gina Moxley is not one for looking back. When the Cork woman wrote her debut play, Danti-Dan, which was originally staged in 1995, she was determined that it would be very much rooted in the present. The critically-acclaimed production explored the sexual awakening of a group of five youngsters.
“There’s no nostalgia. I’m so anti-nostalgia. That is one of the reasons there were all young people, so there were no adults lording it over them. They are not nostalgic, they are living and finding out stuff in real time. There is no looking back and remembering,” she says.
The playwright and actor is, however, happy that the play is being revived in a production by the theatre company Livin’ Dred, under the direction of Aaron Monaghan. Familiar faces in the cast include Moone Boy's David Rawle.
As a Cork native, Moxley is particularly pleased that it will tour to the Everyman theatre, where it played in its original incarnation. For the playwright, it was important that the play would be relevant; she says the themes have taken on a new resonance in today’s world. “What really pleases me is to see that it still makes sense, that it’s not a revisit for the sake of it.”
The play, which is set in the summer of 1970, features a gang of teenagers — Dan, Dolores, Cactus, Noel and Ber — killing time in a boring and oppressive small town. As Ber remarks, it is the kind of place that "If you lost your virginity, somebody would find it and bring it home to your mother".
It could be any small town in Ireland, but in this case it is based in Cork. Moxley grew up just outside the city, in Carrigrohane, where her family owned the Angler’s Rest pub, but she is keen to point out that although its themes are based on what she observed growing up, the play isn’t necessarily autobiographical.
“Everyone always wants me to say ‘it was me’. Why do people want to think that? Everyone’s experience feeds into everything, you do make it up but it’s based on observation and all that kind of stuff as well.” The unfairness of life for women and girls at the time was uppermost in her mind while writing the play.
“For all girls, you’re just watching how you are treated and also we lived in a pub — I would have been seeing more adult interaction and just going ‘Jesus, do we have to put up with this bullshit?’. When I was a teenager, I was more interested in painting and fine art. So it never occurred to me that I might ever write something about it. But I guess from an artistic point of view, there’s always a slight standing aside and watching, that unnerves a lot of people.”
For Moxley, the creative act requires imagination, and she says she has no time for the view that you can’t write about something unless you have lived it. “It's not great for creativity if you can’t imagine somebody else’s experience. Also an awful lot of people’s experiences are pretty boring. If you just have little binoculars on your own experience, then it's not really interesting to us as a society. Tell me something for all of our sakes.”
While the play was written before any of the current cast were born, they bring a whole new energy and perspective to the production, says Moxley.
“They’re much more distant from it. And they were so cross, it was just extraordinary, it made them re-evaluate what is happening now. It was far clearer to read it in the play, how girls are treated and the expectations and the narrowing of any kind of ambition or anything. And you had the thwarting of girls, not being told about sex.”
Moxley tackled similar themes in her most recent play The Patient Gloria, a “gloriously ballsy meditation on therapy, misogyny and female desire”. It was staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. The play was on a roll, then everything just stopped.
“We got a Fringe First and Herald Angel award there and it got brilliant reviews, but then lockdown happened. And so you just think, ‘God, what does that mean for anything or will it change everything?’."
Fortunately, The Patient Gloria was given a new lease of life with a New York run at St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, receiving a rapturous reception. “I mean, we couldn’t have written the New York reviews. We had been wondering if people were even going to go.” Moxley plays three different psychotherapists in the show, which was quite the challenge in a city where everyone has an analyst.
“I’m sitting there on stage when the audience are coming in and I'm going to myself, ‘she’s an analyst, he’s an analyst, they’re analysts’….and I’m thinking, ‘sweetest hour, what have I put myself up for?’ But, yeah, the reviews were forensic and just brilliant.”
The Patient Gloria will also be going on tour in Ireland in April and May, and she says she is "over the moon” that it will also be showing at the Everyman.
It has been a creatively rich time for Moxley, who has previously spoken about how hard it is to make a living in the arts in Ireland. She welcomes the basic income for the arts pilot scheme — “if it happens, and if they get it right, it will be extraordinary”. In 2020, she was also elected to Aosdána, which honours artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the creative arts and awards them an annual stipend.
“It is like night and day, I can't tell you the difference that makes. The money isn’t huge, but the difference is extraordinary. I’m at nearly bus pass age. To have a little bit of security makes a big difference and it actually frees you up mentally, to be able to make stuff. It’s just worry that paralyses an awful lot of people.”
She may be approaching traditional retirement age but Moxley is not taking her foot off the pedal any time soon. “I don't really feel like I have the luxury to look back. There’s no kind of retirement age for artists, it's like, don’t look down or back, just keep going. It’s been really rewarding actually, the past couple of years, even with lockdown. I’ve got to do things that have worked out, although you can still utterly make a bags of things which has to be your right.
"I think the most important thing for me is to keep taking risks and jackknife every now and then, think you’re going that way and go, ‘no, I’ve done that’.”
Moxley did make one concession to going back, however. She starred in Corcadorca’s Guests of the Nation in Cork last year, which afforded the opportunity to revisit one of her childhood haunts near the former family pub.
“The Angler’s Rest is beautiful now. Last summer when I was down doing the Corcadorca show, we went back out swimming in the Hell Hole and it’s just gorgeous. When you’re a teenager, you don’t see the beauty of the trees. I finally went to art school into the Crawford, and then I was lying down in the grass at home looking up in the sky, thinking, ‘I've lived here for 18 years, how come I never did this before?’ You don’t know these things until you learn to look around yourself from outside yourself.”
- Danti-Dan is in the Everyman Theatre, Cork, on Wed and Thurs, Feb 8 and 9, post-show talk on Wed. www.everymancork.com
