Síomha Hennessy told David Hennessy about her one woman show show 30 Under 30 which she brings to the London Irish Centre this week.
Síomha Hennessy is a musician, actress and comedian from Rathfarnham, Dublin.
She is bringing her one-woman comedy cabaret show, 30 Under 30, show to the London Irish Centre in Camden this week. She previously performed it at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
The show, about late bloomers, sexism, and ageism, asks if it is possible to be successful outside all those ‘30 under 30’ lists seen across our media.
Síomha chatted to us.
Q: What inspired 30 Under 30?
“Our society loves to glorify youth, these hot young things who are making it really early.
“Every end of year, there’s always that big list of the most exciting new artists to watch out for. I’ve never made any of those lists.
“Certainly, when the clock ran out on the 30 under 30, I had to give up the dream of being one of those exciting new talents to watch out for.
“The show satirises all that, the idea of your big ambitions and hopes and dreams and my plan to be a star far earlier in my career.
“I’m not there yet but I’m still scrabbling away and the whole show is a satire on both myself and a fame-obsessed, youth-obsessed celebrity culture.”
Q: Is there a lot of yourself in the character?
“Yeah, but it’s a really heightened, exaggerated character.
“I do operate under my own actual name which, maybe, is a mistake.
“It might be an idea to have a stage name because it is a totally exaggerated version of myself.
“It takes my own insecurities, flaws and the shadow side of my personality and it totally amplifies that and just has a lot of fun with it.
“I really play into the insufferable, vain, shallow, tragic heroine, crumbling cabaret dame.
“I just have a lot of fun with that character.
“I’m not going to say that there isn’t plenty of me in it, but it wouldn’t be a true-to-life, at scale representation of my day-to-day self.”
Q: Your previous show, out of which this one grew, was called The Coil’s Lament…
“I changed the title, The Coil’s Lament, because some young women saw it and thought, ‘Oh, great, a show that finally deals with the issues affecting women’s health and reproduction and all this’.
“Some people probably thought of nothing worse.
“Actually, the song is literally just about how p***ed off my (contraceptive) coil is with me for sending no action it’s way.
“It’s a purely comic show. I changed the title, because I didn’t Repeal the Eighth and all of that.
“It’s something I care about a lot.
“But the show is political in the sense that it deals with what it is to be a woman in her 30s dealing with double standards, sexism, social pressures and navigating all that.
“It goes into a lot of issues, especially decisions around women’s future and children and relationships and domestic life and the impossible choices women are forced to make.
“How women often abandon artistic careers because they are forced to do so by a society that just doesn’t support mothers and doesn’t support artists who are mothers.
“The show delves into that and the anxieties around making these difficult choices.
“Age really comes into it.
“There’s a lot of the sense of age and time ticking and what a pressure cooker that decade is for women, their 30s, and the ageism in the industry.
“The pressure is coming from all angles: to be youthful but also to settle down and have kids and how difficult it is to have a career in the arts and how many people are pushed out of the arts.”
Q: It’s both sexism and ageism. A man could not have written it…
“No, not at all.
“It’s very different for men.
“It’s not to say that men don’t face other hurdles but, no, a man couldn’t write the show.
“There’re no men agonising in their mid-30s about whether to have kids because they won’t be able to continue their career as an artist if they have kids.
“All my friends who have kids tell me, ‘You need to know that the art goes as soon as you have babies’.
“I have friends who are artists, or who were doing art, and they’re not doing it in any committed way, for so many reasons.
“Artists can’t make a living for the most part.
“It’s very, very precarious so you bring kids into the picture obviously the pressure of getting a better paying career becomes almost unavoidable.
“Society doesn’t support artists and doesn’t support mothers – so those two things together become untenable.
“There’s a lot about looking at a fork in the road around trying to pursue this life or a domestic, settled, steady life.
“There’s a lot of humour in it because it’s about conflicting desires.
“The settled domestic life has lots of appeal but it’s also very boring.
“I do a lot of joking in the show about straight couples on Instagram and how uncool they are.
“Is there anything less cool than a straight couple dangling keys in front of a ‘Sale Agreed’ sign?
“There’s nothing more soul destroying than the way society forces us to copy each other, and all just do everything at the exact same stage.
“Everyone gets engaged at the same time.
“Everybody, if they’re fortunate enough, gets married first and tries to buy a house.
“It makes you so want to blow your bloody brains out watching that. At the same time, living out of a bloody suitcase in Edinburgh Fringe is sh*te, too’.
“The show explores a tug of war between the two impulses.
“Women in the audiences respond really strongly but actually, funny enough, men have a great laugh as well.
“I’ve had plenty of men in the audiences and in fairness to them they take the slagging well.”
“People are glad to see a woman in her mid 30s be like, ‘I’m not doing that stuff. I don’t have a husband or babies or a bloody Montessori school nearby. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m living on a shoestring’.
“People like to see women living unapologetically and doing something outside of the norm.
“I’m not above it but I’m trying to navigate it.
“The show’s message is, ‘Don’t blame yourself if you haven’t achieved your dreams’.
“Our capitalist society won’t really let you. Dreams are only for nepo babies and people with generational wealth. We all need to stop beating ourselves up for not becoming the ballerinas or Hollywood actors we thought we would.
“There’s much broader social and economic context to that.
“It’s not really your fault you didn’t manage to become a renowned painter and had to get a job in tech instead, it’s almost unavoidable in this capitalist economy that doesn’t support the arts and parents.”
Q: What was your big dream? You do music, acting, comedy, writing…
“That’s a good question. Maybe my big problem is I couldn’t pick one.
“That’s certainly in some ways held me back, in some ways helped me.
“I started doing stand-up.
“It started going well but, obviously, the music was never going to be abandoned. It always had to be a core part.
“Trying to combine them with the comedy is the big project right now.
“It’s been going pretty okay but the industry does like to categorise you, to make you either a singer or a comedian, or a musical comedian.
“I don’t want to be lumped into just musical comedian because my songs are good and I release them as proper songs and try to get radio play for them.
“I have a new single called Unexpectedly Unfamous that is coming out 6 June and it’s the song that opens the show.”
Q: Your mother was in the family band Na Casaidigh and you performed with your sister Ornait as Sisterix. Music was big in your family…
“Mother was in a traditional and Irish folk music band with her brothers, so we were surrounded by that growing up and all of our cousins play music.
“I was in a band, a duo, with my sister for a couple of years called Sisterix.
“We released about five singles and then took a break because we were killing each other. We just said, ‘You know what, it might be healthier for us to do our own things’.
“That’s not to say we won’t come back to it because we do make nice music together.”
Q: Liam and Noel Gallagher (Oasis) got back together…
“We would make Liam and Noel look like choir boys. We were vicious. I once kicked her on stage.
“That was probably the turning point.
“Ah no, we have an understanding but at the same time, I wanted to develop this comedy stuff and songs that probably didn’t have a home in Sisterix, songs that were a bit more pantomime-y, a bit more theatrical, a bit more cabaret.
“But music is huge and that’s never, ever going to be abandoned.”
Q: You’ve been compared to Phoebe Waller- Bridge and Sharon Horgan, which must be pleasing…
“Yes. Oh, definitely.
“Find me one single woman who wouldn’t be delighted to be named in a sentence with those two. It’s fantastic. That was amazing. I was delighted.
“The problem is that almost every female comedian is compared to those women. I’ll take it – but how many Phoebe Waller-Bridges can we have?
“It should just be me and her.”
Q: Is this your first time bringing a show to London?
“Yeah, I’ve done some comedy clubs there on mixed bill nights, but this is my first time bringing my own show.
“There’s a lovely artistic Irish community around London and I’ve had some lovely support from people who are already there, and they’ve been helping me.
“The London Irish Centre has been fantastic as well.
“It’s just such a great place and I feel in good hands doing it in the London Irish Centre, it’s a lovely place to do the first show in because it’s just such a great place.
“I’m planning on moving to London in the summer.
“There’s a lot going on there, you know.”
- Síomha Hennessy’s 30 Under 30 is at the London Irish Centre in Camden this Thursday (29 May). Unexpectedly Unfamous is released on 6 June. For more information about Síomha, click here.