Culture That Made Me: Des Kennedy, the Belfast-born director of the Everyman in Cork
Des Kennedy, artistic director at the Everyman Theatre in Cork. Picture: Darragh Kane.
Des Kennedy, 42, grew up in Twinbrook, West Belfast. In 2012, he worked as an associate director on the musical which ran for several years. He started working on the hit play in 2015, which opened in London’s West End that summer before touring internationally, including on Broadway.
In 2024, he was appointed artistic director of the Everyman in Cork. Kennedy is currently directing by Brian Friel, at the theatre until April 26.
The first play I saw was Arthur Miller’s at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre. I was 13. I was in a youth club and my best friend told me she was in a play at the Lyric, so my dad, who was a bus driver, got the night off to take me to it. I didn't know anything about the play.
She was my age, so I expected it to be like a panto or a musical, but it was this amazing political drama. I fell in love with theatre that night. It was so scary, atmospheric and anger-inducing.
Even though the play was about the Salem witch trials, I could tell somehow the production was saying something about what was going on outside in the streets of Belfast in the ’90s.
When I was 16, I became a member of the National Youth Theatre, so I got to go to London for a month. I remember getting to see Patrick Marber’s in the West End. It was the première. Imogen Poots was in it. Incredible writing – it felt very contemporary and sexy. Up until that point, I had always thought of plays being things from the past.
When I was about 17, I did work experience for the Belfast Festival at Queen’s. I got to work with The Wooster Group, a New York avant-garde theatre company. Willem Dafoe and Elizabeth LeCompte were in Eugene O'Neill’s
It was a profound experience – extraordinary to be exposed to that kind of international work. It expanded my mind as to what theatre could be.
They deconstructed the play and created a postmodern version. It was mind-blowing, turning this classic play about slavery and race into a two-hander with video and multimedia and Japanese kabuki performance style.
is the best TV show written, especially now given a world where people are so polarised about their beliefs and why things are a certain way. It’s about society, but it takes a zoomed-out view of things like power, poverty and politics, and how it's all interconnected – how these systems into which we're born can define so much about the lives we’re forced to live.
And it's very entertaining. It doesn't patronise the audience. It's complex, almost Dickensian, with these characters living in poverty, but with big political messages about the breakdown of society.
I like documentaries about cults! I've watched everything you can name about the NXIVM cult. There are a couple of documentaries on Amazon Prime and HBO about it. NXIVM is an organisation for privileged people in the United States to do self-healing and wellness. They end up giving all their money to a guru who’s manipulating and who takes advantage of them. There are sinister organisations within the organisation who punish their members. They're not the most sophisticated documentaries. There's a predictability about them, almost, but that’s satisfying.
is an amazing documentary about the Strokes and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs and that wave of music – that Brooklyn, New York indie music scene that was happening about the year 2000.
It reminds me of my youth. It's a snapshot of those bands, as they were being discovered, with a lot of footage of the Strokes becoming a massive success, and how they were burnt out by their celebrity very quickly.
I love Tennessee Williams’ It's a beautiful play. John Tiffany's production at the Edinburgh Festival in 2016 had Cherry Jones playing Amanda. Bob Crowley who is a Cork designer created this amazing, very simple, spare set for the Wingfields’ apartment. I remember the emotional kick of it. It was kind of the perfect production of I don't think I can see another production, having seen that one in Edinburgh.
Tony Kushner is a favourite playwright of mine. I love American playwrights. He writes big political dramas, state-of-the-nation plays about America, well-structured with excellent dialogue, strong characters.
He wrote Angels in America, an amazing two-part play about the American Aids crisis in the 1980s. HBO made it into a miniseries.
As a kid, a favourite movie was the dark sequel to Dorothy has electroshock therapy to get her rid of the dreams she remembers having visited Oz. It’s an off-the-wall, macabre movie.
Although it’s a Disney movie, it didn't do well when it came out. It was so dark and scary it put a lot of people off, but I remember enjoying being scared by the movie.
As a youngster I loved a Cameron Crowe movie with Kate Hudson about a rock band touring in America in the 1970s. Vanilla Sky is another favourite of mine, which is another Cameron Crowe movie. He’s a favourite director. He won the Oscar for He's got amazing visual storytelling. He works brilliantly with music.
He's an excellent screenwriter as well. His stories always pack an emotional punch. They’re not cold and distancing. They have warm, fully fleshed characters who you believe in and care about.
Tales of the City
are 10 novels written by Armistead Maupin. They’re about young people living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, early 80s, and the Aids crisis and the sexual revolution in America.
I remember reading those when I was about 20 and not being able to stop. I flew through the series, including recent releases, which are sequels. They've been made into a TV series with Laura Linney. I found them quite profound.
I love Michael Cunningham’s novels. He's the American writer of which was made into a film. It's set in three different time periods, with three heroines, a deconstructed version of Mrs Dalloway set in contemporary America.
One of the characters is Virginia Woolf, who Nicole Kidman played in the movie. He’s a very clever writer, one of those authors whose work I can't put down.
The Education of an Idealist
A memoir I enjoyed was Samantha Power’s She’s an Irish woman – who grew up in Dublin – who worked for the Obama administration.
It was great to hear her journey with Obama, how she got to where she was, despite her background and the difficulty in her family growing up – that an Irish person got to the rooms she was in, doing the work she did, and learning about genocide denial along the way. It's a brilliant read.
