Accents
Ambassador Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
The obvious question if you’re seeing Accents, a poetic drama by Emmet Kirwan and Eoin French, for the first time might be: where’s the party? The last time you saw Kirwan pouncing onstage and speaking in verse it was probably during Dublin Oldschool, his breakout play turned phenomenon, from 2014, in which he played an on-the-run DJ who escaped into a haze of Dublin Bacchanalia.
This time he’s playing himself, in autobiographical comings and goings to and from the National Maternity Hospital while his partner expects their son. (It’s a pivot Kirwan seems intent on. “If anybody came here expecting poems about doing yokes: psych!” he says.)
First seen in 2022, Accents returns tinged with grief. French, who released music as the indie-electronic artist Talos, died last year. This play goes on tour shortly after French’s wife, Steph, and friends such as Ólafur Arnalds and Dermot Kennedy gave a stirring tribute performance of We Didn’t Know We Were Ready, a song he cowrote, on The Tommy Tiernan Show.
French showed in his music a preference for spaciousness that can easily smother a nimble voice like Kirwan’s. The score quickly narrows to meet the performer, however. While describing surreal anticipation in the maternity ward, Kirwan conjures absurdly hallucinatory images of belligerent babies. He imagines his son speaking his first words as soon as he is born: “Where’s the bleedin’ bass?” French obliges, introducing a dance beat for Kirwan’s verse to ping against.
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As the play sends Kirwan home from the hospital, the plot becomes another Dublin odyssey, showing him on a profound search for parenthood. He visits the city-centre street where his mother used to live and, touchingly, allows for her own sweeping urban quests through mid-century Dublin. French’s gauzy effects recede for a childhood piano as she is depicted walking carefree down O’Connell Street, standing up a date she has changed her mind about.
Accents is proof that such Dublin promenades needn’t be populated by gangsters and cops to have friction. We see Kirwan visit his parents in Tallaght before returning to the hospital; they conjure a woeful history of State neglect: the new working-class suburb has no amenities. That leaves a legacy Kirwan worries about passing on, having navigated a place fraught with desperation and fear, and having been assaulted as a teenager. “They tried to change me / And they did / But this won’t be the inheritance of the kid,” he says.
Kirwan turns his anger on classist myths (“If you come from violence, you become violence”) while skewering politicians for failing to provide public housing (“You can get away with anything with a gentle whisper,” he purrs). In an affectionate promise towards the play’s conclusion, after journeying from shame to pride, he is joyful at the prospect of passing his family history to his son.
Alongside such resolute declarations, Accents isn’t short on swooning sonic metaphors. At one point he describes how he and his partner will be transformed by their son’s arrival: “Like a tuning fork bringing us into key.”
Accents is at the Ambassador Theatre, Dublin, until Saturday, January 18th. It then tours to the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, January 31st and February 1st; Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow, February 5th-7th; Belltable, Limerick, February 13th and 14th; Everyman, Cork, February 18th and 19th; and Town Hall Theatre, Galway, February 21st
