Marty Breen told David Hennesy about their show BITCH which contemplates difficult themes.
Wicklow actor and theatremaker Marty Breen explores punch-down humour, resenting your identity, and questions of complicity through a blend of stand-up, cabaret and theatre in the show BITCH that is showing at Edinburgh Fringe fresh from a run at Project Arts Centre in Dublin.
The show depicts two characters, both performed by Marty: The stand up comedian and the Bitch who duke it out through an open-mic battle: him through his red-flag laden set, and her through acerbic original songs at the piano.
But one is not as entertaining – she is a dogged, drunk and self-destructive mess, ripe for a roasting by her male counterpart.
Contemplating themes such as sexual assault, BITCH challenges the audience reconsider what makes a ‘bad guy’ and a ‘good victim’, and our own complicity in what we all allow to happen.
BITCH premiered at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2024 where it won the Radical Spirit of the Fringe award.
Marty Breen, who uses she/they pronouns, graduated from the Lir in 2018 and is a member of Broad Strokes Improv, an all-women and non-binary improv group.
What inspired you to write BITCH? I know it was somewhat inspired by stand up, actually was it your own stand up?
“No, I am not a stand up.
“I play a stand up in this and but have no aspirations to do comedy.
“I find it terrifying but it’s very fun to do it in BITCH because it’s as a character and it’s pre written and there is a lot of audience interaction.
“A lot of that is from Broad Strokes and from doing improv.
“I don’t think I ever would have been brave enough to do something like BITCH if I hadn’t been with them, if we hadn’t all started together and learned together for so many years.
“I said yes to being in Broad Strokes when Ciara Berkeley, the brilliant actor and director who founded it, approached me because I just went, ‘I cannot imagine anything more terrifying, so I should probably do it’.
“That was a lot of what kind of galvanised me to do it but it was still pretty terrifying.
“But I watched a lot of stand up growing up, particularly Tim Minchin and his shows.
“They’re probably the biggest influence on at least the form of the piece.
“A lot of the stand ups that I really liked watching as a kid or as a young person have had either stuff come out about them in the last few years or just if you go back and watch their material now you’re kind of going, ‘I can’t believe what we were all condoning for so long’.
“That was a lot of the inspiration.
“I knew I wanted it to kind of play with those two forms.
“It took about a year’s writing for all the music and then the stand up was really found in the room with our brilliant team because you need an audience to even know if something works.
“I was so relieved in our first preview to discover that it worked.”
You performed the piece in Dublin last year, how did it resonate with the audience there?
“I think it’s an interesting one.
“There’s a lot of warnings all the way through the play that say, ‘It’s going to be like this and you’re going to forget’.
“All the way, ‘It’s going to go here and you’ll forget’.
“And they do forget, it seems, which is obviously the point.
“But what I really loved about Dublin Fringe and Bee Sparks in particular, who runs Dublin Fringe, is they were so receptive to where the play ended up going and really encouraging of that.
“Even when I was kind of going, ‘We’re advertising this big, sexy, fun night and it’s turning out to not be a fun night because it goes somewhere very different in the second half. You’ve great fun for the first half..’
“But she was really like, ‘No, follow your nose, write what you need to write’.
“So the reception was really gratifying in a way where it does go to a hard place and it tries to not spit the audience back out at the end, they go on the journey with her.
“Fringe is obviously a very particular market but we were really gratified to find that there was a lot more people that it either resonated with or really had great reactions to the show than we expected.
“I was probably a little bit dismissive, ‘Okay, I don’t know how people over a certain age are going to feel about it’.
“Or, ‘I don’t know how people who aren’t in my demographic or my gender or identity are going to feel about it’.
“We felt really lucky that it really seemed to do what we wanted, the feeling of the play was pretty universal which was great.
“Also it’s live feedback for the first half because it’s comedy so that’s always really fun.
“And on the nights where maybe some jokes don’t land or it’s a little bit off or anything like that, that’s also great to play because it’s as characters so it’s these characters trying to grapple with, ‘Okay, well, what am I going to do now?’
“And the audience basically decide a lot of the tone of the show or at least the trajectory of these characters because they’re kind of described as being in a dog fight for who the audience likes more.
“A dog fight can or can’t be more aggressive depending on how it’s going.”
Stand Up Guy and the titular BITCH are in this dog fight. Bitch is described as self destructive, does that make her unlikable?
“That’s a great question that only the show answers or never answers.
“The whole show is that kind of chicken and egg question about what makes a bad person, where they come from, if they even exist, and if they do, how do we spot them?
“The play is basically like, ‘How likable are either of them?’
“And, ‘Does likability make someone a good person?’
“And someone not being very likable or not very charming or a bit much, it doesn’t necessarily equate them to being a bad person or deserving bad things happening to them.
“That’s the line that the whole play tows and hopefully the audience either do or don’t fall on either side but they are at least taken on that journey and made to ask themselves those questions.”
Those big questions and themes such as blame culture and punch down humour are all discussed. You feel we are not talking about the difficult subjects..
“I think we’re not necessarily having the right conversations, that’s what the play is trying to say.
“We’re all having the conversations of, ‘This sh*t happens and it happens to so many people and we all know somebody’, and we’re not having the conversation if we all know someone it’s happened to, we must all know someone who’s done something that might be like in this play.
“That’s the conversation of the play.
“I don’t know how to have that conversation.
“I don’t know how to look around or spot that or confront that so I am putting it on stage as a start.
“That’s all I know how to do.
“This is a way to maybe at least start that thought process in people’s heads.
“The people that I really wrote it for are definitely the people who are maybe like our Stand Up Guy or know people like him, that’s who it’s there for.
“It’s presenting it in a new way.”
Marty mentions being inspired by comics like Daniel Sloss, Hannah Gadsby and Natalie Palamides.
“They’re using comedy as an amazing lens to really disarm people so that then when you do punch them with harder truths, they kind of go, ‘Oh f**k, I was laughing. What was I laughing at?’
“That was really who I wrote it for, the very people that might not have ever considered it this way because, unfortunately, a lot of people have, they might have some experience of it.
“It’s not news to most of us.
“It’s not news to anybody.
“There’s an open warning at the beginning of the show that’s kind of saying, ‘You can leave at any time’. And sometimes people did but mostly people didn’t and there’s huge trust in that for people to stay if it might be difficult for them and if they do, I think the play does mind them and it brings them back.
“We all get to kind of come together at the end.
“But I think if there’s anything that doing it taught me, it’s that if people are brave enough to want to go there with you, that’s a real honour.”
What is Stand Up Guy like, is he misogynistic?
“No, he’s not anything.
“I think he becomes stuff that you kind of go, ‘Isn’t that a bit of a red flag?’
“But he’s a great guy and there’s nothing to catch out necessarily.
“A lot of his stuff is inspired by the stuff that’s still going around.
“I mean we’ve just had Chris Brown sell out an arena in Dublin.
“The actions and the art seem to be very easily separated.
“He is so fun to play: Wonderfully charming, has great fun with the audience, bold. He’s everything you would want in a stand up.
“He’s pushing boundaries.
“He’s kind of towing the line between what’s okay to say and what’s not.
“But I guess that’s the point: When someone is maybe charming or charismatic or powerful or anything like that, we don’t notice when the line is crossed as much or it’s towing it and then suddenly if it goes over, we’re enjoying ourselves almost too much.
“Hopefully.
“That’s what the show aims to do anyway.
“The show is the same every night but it’s very different every night depending on the audience.”
Another theme is resisting identity..
“It’s all that chicken and egg stuff of going, ‘Am I like this or am I made like this? Who am I without these things that I’ve been taught or these things that happened?’
“I guess it’s nature versus nurture but it’s not a very nurturing show.
“It never answers any of those questions but it does present them: How much of you is your behaviour and how you treat other people and all of that?
“Whatever’s there for people to want to hear or have resonate with them is all absolutely there but even if they come away with only one of the many questions that the play asks then I’ve done my job.”
Born in Newcastle, County Wicklow, as a teen you snuck out of school to take the two-hour bus to the Dublin Youth Theatre. Is that where you found yourself and your place?
“I lied on my application form for Dublin Youth Theatre and said I lived with my grandmother.
“I did live with her on weekends but I put that as my permanent address because at the time, there was no youth theatre in Wicklow.
“I must have known before DYT but the years that I was there, two years in a row we had shows in Dublin Theatre Festival. For a teenager to be in the same internationally recognised theatre festival with only professional productions I was going like, ‘Oh, this is what it is, this is what theatre is’.
“DYT Is what introduced me to theatre.
“I mean I wrote a lot as a kid and it’s nice that I found my way back to that.”
After school, you attended The Lír National Academy of Dramatic Art, was that incredible?
“Yeah, I think I didn’t really think past the Lir very much.
“I just wanted to go to college to do performing.
“I didn’t really think about what life would look like afterwards or anything like that.
“I just went, ‘That, that’s I want to do that for three years’.
“It’s an amazing school and we’re so lucky to have it and I was so lucky to go.”
Of course you have done a lot of work on stage and were Irish Times Theatre Award nominated for your work in The Tempest, was that an honour?
“Yeah, it was great.
“It was amazing.
“I was Ariel in an outdoor production of The Tempest by Rough Magic.
“Eleanor Methven played Prospero.
“She’s such a powerhouse and we very much found those characters together.
“I loved what we found together.
“It’s always nice when that’s recognised but at the same time, I’ve been proud of loads of productions I’ve been in.”
Your screen work includes Say Nothing, Baltimore and Power Ballad directed by John Carney and starring Paul Rudd, what was it like to be on things like that?
“Brilliant.
“I love being on set.
“I love the pace of it.
“I think if the part is right, it’s always really exciting when you feel like you’re able to keep pace.
“Last year I did my first big show which was on RTÉ called Good Boy and that was the first time I’d been on a set an extended period.
“I felt really lucky.
“I loved the show and I loved the gang that was made.
“Fergal Costello, the director, was amazing.
“It was also such an eye opening experience.
“I’ve been on bigger sets and I’ve always kind of had a smaller role.
“I think I thought, ‘Oh God, maybe I wouldn’t be ready for something that was more demanding or a bigger responsibility or anything’.
“It was a bigger role and it was still really good.
“I equally love screen and theatre.
“They’re just very different media and theatre had me first.”
Also recipient of the Romilly Walton Masters from Centre Culturel Irlandais, you can expect to see Marty write a follow up show.
“Right now BITCH is my focus and the doing of the show is the real love for me.
“It’s exactly why we’re taking it to Edinburgh, to get as many people to see it as possible.
“Getting to keep doing it would really be the dream.
“BITCH really thrives on really varied, really up for anything, really diverse or eclectic audiences.
“That’s really why we’re just trying to get the word out at this point.
“The more people that see it, the better because I only know how to have this conversation this way and I think we need to be having it.
“We’re really trying to, especially with Edinburgh, reach an international audience and people who might not have seen something like this before, that’s the hope.”
BITCH is at the Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh 30 July- 25 August. To book and for more information, click here.
