'Beautiful soul and towering talent': Emmet Kirwan on working with the late Eoin French/Talos
Emmet Kirwan in Accents. Picture: Ste Murray
When the Cork musician Eoin French died at the tragically young age of 36 last August, he left behind a bereft creative community. His impact could be clearly seen recently when a group of musicians came together on RTÉ’s Tommy Tiernan Show to give an emotionally charged rendition of 'We Didn’t Know We Were Ready', a song co-written by French at the Sounds from a Safe Harbour Festival in Cork.
French, aka Talos, had a gift for collaboration, and for making friends, as writer and actor Emmet Kirwan can testify; he and French hit it off immediately when they met while recording a radio show. They stayed in touch, eventually fulfilling their wish of working together, despite the small matter of a pandemic getting in the way. The result was Accents, a play combining their poetic and musical talents, which had two sell-out runs in 2022.
The production, directed by Claire O’Reilly, has recently embarked on another national tour, taking in the Everyman Theatre in Cork later this month. Kirwan describes the tour as a testament to his friend’s “beautiful soul and towering talent”. French was producing work to the end, and his intention was that his music would continue to be released and performed.
“We wrestled with bringing the show back but I know he really wanted people to hear it,” says Kirwan.
French has been in his thoughts throughout preparations for the tour but particularly when we talk. “I just got a copy of the printed play and there is a dedication that I wrote in it to him. He has been on my mind all the way through this but this morning specifically, reading over that and thinking about what the show is, and about him and his music, the effect he had on people’s lives.”
On stage, the musician’s spirit is very much with Kirwan, and that of fellow performers, the classically trained musicians Ben Bix and Brian Dillon.
“This show was very much a conversation on stage between myself and Eoin and Ben and Brian. It is the three of us now, trying to navigate our way through it, reconstructing his vision for others,” says Kirwan.
French was blessed with many talents, as well as being a musician and composer, he was an artist, architect and lecturer in UCC. Kirwan says he was a joy to work with on many levels. “He was a real renaissance man but he was so much fun. We had so much craic making the show. He was so light-hearted and didn’t take himself too seriously, which he could have because he had such talent.”
Tallaght native Kirwan is known for his incisive and engaging take on class and social justice, in work such as the play-turned-film Dublin Oldschool. Accents continues these themes, exploring issues including gentrification, the housing crisis and parenthood. French’s music was the initial foundation; Kirwan, an adept purveyor of spoken word performance, felt it would combine perfectly with poetry. The birth of Kirwan’s son provided further inspiration.
“I wanted to make something beautiful — Eoin’s music struck that in me, it was ethereal, heavenly, sublime. We had about two poems and then my wife gave birth to my son. That changed what the play was completely. Because of Covid I had to spend time outside the hospital in Holles Street with the other dads. I was thinking about the levelling or unifying experience of all these dads of different classes, from different parts of Dublin all out on the street together. I was thinking of what my son’s voice would be — what kind of accent he would have.”
Kirwan also began to reflect on his family’s roots in inner-city Dublin and how they had been pushed out to the suburbs to make way for office buildings and expensive apartment schemes. This brought an element of documentary theatre to the play, he says.
“My mother lived around the corner from Holles Street, on Leeson Street, where she would have played games on the road. I did interviews with my aunties, my mam and my dad, and it became an anthropological look at the working class in Dublin, being moved from the centre as renters.”
It echoes the precarious situation so many people are in now, struggling to play exorbitant rents. As an ambassador for the housing charity Threshold, it is a subject close to Kirwan’s heart.
“The only way to solve [the housing crisis] is to build public housing on a massive scale, not just 10%, as the legislation calls for. As long as foreign direct investment and vulture funds can come in and buy up large swathes of land before other people can, as long as they keep turning them into renters, people will continue to live in precarious situations,” he says.
Like much of Kirwan’s work, Accents has important messages at its heart, but these are never delivered with a heavy hand or moralising tone.
“The play is really life-affirming, it is all about the families that we make and the communities that we build. Artists usually pose questions, and people say ‘what’s the answer?’ In this, there is a comedy bit about giving some answers where we list off ways of solving the housing crisis in a ragtime way. Everything I write is a comedy. Most of the things I have ever done are comedies to some degree. There is politics and all of that but you also owe people a good time. If they get a ticket, a babysitter or whatever and come to the show, they’ll never forgive you if you give them a TED talk.”
Ultimately, culture does not exist independently of the society we live in and Kirwan demonstrates how justifiable anger can be channelled into something of artistic importance that fuels change for the common good.
“In the face of all of this, there is hope, because ultimately cynicism can only go so far. Without that cynicism, you can’t actually solve the problems but it is about not allowing that overwhelm everything in your life and everything you do. It is about telling people don’t delay, do the thing you want to do.”
On this theme, Kirwan says that he learned many things from his collaboration and friendship with French but one of the most important was to act on creative inspiration.
“He taught me that ‘now’ is a good time — I don’t mean that in the sense of him passing. My approach is quite scattershot; he was very focused. I would say ‘maybe we could do this’, I’d go home and go to bed, he would go home and hit the keyboard and create this whole thing. There was a sense of urgency behind everything that he did. He would do something until he got it right. He also had this ability to maintain friendships, and that was evident in how his life was celebrated.”
Kirwan says that the performances of Accents in Cork will have a special resonance. “It will be a homecoming for Eoin’s music, I hope the audience will listen proudly to their brilliant son and artist. They will get good music, a laugh and something that’s hopefully emotional but a celebration of life.”
- Accents is at Everyman Theatre, 8pm on Tue, Feb 18 and Wed, Feb 19.
- www.everymancork.com
- The tour also includes Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Feb 5-7; Belltable, Limerick, Feb 13-14; Town Hall Theatre, Galway, Feb 21
