Mary Kate O’Flanagan told David Hennessy about her one woman show Making a Show of Myself which is about to come to the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
Mary Kate O’Flanagan brings her one woman show Making a Show of Myself to The Irish Cultural Centre this wee.
Written and performed by Mary Kate herself, the show sees her telling stories from her own life.
Mary Kate came to prominence when her story Carry Him Shoulder High won The Moth Grand Slam in Los Angeles in 2017.
Her performance went viral on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok garnering 1.3 million views in 48 hours.
After runs at Smock Alley in Dublin and Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Making a Show of Myself travelled to New York for a four-week off-Broadway run at the Irish Repertory Theatre.
Her performance has seen Mary Kate nominated at the Outer Critics Circle awards.
Mary Kate is nominated for Best Solo Performance along big names like Sean Hayes, Jack Holden, Daniel Radcliffe and Jean Smart.
Mary Kate is now bringing the show to London.
Ahead of its shows at Irish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith Mary Kate took time to chat to the Irish World.
What inspired the show, Making a Show of Myself?
“Like all Irish people I’ve been an amateur storyteller my whole life.
“The Moth StorySLAM came to Ireland.
“Basically it’s competitive storytelling.
“They advertise a theme a few weeks in advance and then anyone who wants can get up and tell a story.
“People were saying to me, ‘You love stories, you should go along’.
“I remember my sister Rachael saying, ‘Mary, there’s people queuing down Leeson Street in the cold and the wet and the dark just to hear stories’.
“It’s so interesting how hungry people are for fairly unpolished stories just coming straight from the storyteller’s mouth.
“And the Moth rules, which I’ve adopted for all my stories, are: It has to be your story, it has to be true and you’ve got to bring it in on seven minutes.
“I went along to the Moth and the theme that night was mothers.
“I went, ‘I’ve got a story about my mam’, and it was actually a story about my mother and her mother.
“I got up and I told it.
“It wasn’t very polished but it was a story I told many times over a cup of coffee or over a dinner table- and it won, so I was delighted with myself.
“It was only a week later that my sister Catherine said to me, ‘You know you’ll be in a Grand Slam now?’
“The Grand Slam is when they take the ten previous winners and they get them to compete against each other: New theme, new stories and usually on a new stage.
“I won that and then I was like, ‘Ooh, maybe I’m good at this’.
“I was in Los Angeles for work and I was like, ‘Hey, the Moth started in the States’.
“So I entered in Los Angeles and I won that and then I won the Grand Slam in Los Angeles.
“And the Moth in the States put that story out on their socials and it went viral.
“An Irish theatre maker saw it.
“His name is Will O’Connell.
“We became theatre pals and one night, we were sitting down at the beginning of a show and I said to him, ‘I feel like I’ve got a show in me’.
“And he said, ‘Oh, I’ll help you’.
“The director of Smock Alley was like, ‘If Will is directing it, we’ll take a chance on it’.
“I ran it for Will and the biggest creative challenge to me was, ‘How do you stitch these stories together?’
“The question was how to weave it together.
“What makes it an experience that stays with people is that the material makes them see how it relates to their lives.”
You have had a lot of people say how inspiring they find the show..
“Definitely.
“People are like, ‘I’m going home to write a story about my grandmother now’, or, ‘I’m going home to write my own story’.
“Very often people want to tell me their stories and sometimes people want me to sign things and I just always sign, ‘Tell your stories’.
“Because I do think telling your own story is a very radical act that you’re reclaiming the narrative.
“But the biggest response actually, and we probably haven’t captured it in vox pops, possibly because it would be too intrusive, is that people end up bawling crying. Men and women end up crying.”
It is the story of your father’s funeral that went viral. I found it very moving. You spoke of how you and your five sisters said you were carrying your father’s coffin which surprised the funeral directors who were expecting some men in the family to step forward. It’s very inspiring..
“It is really interesting.
“And of course they (funeral directors) came from a good place because they feared that we wouldn’t be able and there would be some kind of scene and that we would regret it.
“I can see that they’re trying to get everything right for us.
“It comes from a good place.
“We knew we could do it and it was important to us.
“That’s just not the women he raised to go, ‘Oh yeah, let a man do this thing’ if I can do it.
“And it could have been his sons-in-law or his brothers but it just felt wrong to us to do that.
“It was also interesting because six people carrying one coffin, unless the person was very big, that’s not that hard.
“It’s just a tradition that men do it and women friends subsequently did go, ‘I’m going to carry the coffin too’.
“It made people question, ‘Why do we just go, ‘It will be all men’.
“And it’s fine if it’s a mix of men and women, it’s just that my father happened to have six daughters.”
It says something about gender roles, doesn’t it? But I have heard you saying that you don’t believe such sexism is as ingrained in Ireland as it is in other places like England and America..
“Oh, I’ve always thought that.
“When I first went to the States or first went to London, I was astonished.
“The thing I heard a lot was, ‘I’m not a feminist but..’- Women saying this.
“And I was like, ‘What do you mean you’re not a feminist?’
“And they’d be like, ‘Well, you know..’
“And I’d be like, ‘No, no, I don’t know. What do you mean?’
“I genuinely was baffled.
“I wasn’t being belligerent.
“I was like, ‘A feminist is somebody who thinks men and women should have equal rights, do you not think men and women should have equal rights?’
“And they were like, ‘Oh but you know..’
“What they meant was they bought into this idea which still is abounding that a feminist is a woman who’s belligerent and aggressive and misandrous and has a chip on her shoulder and all of these things.
“And, of course, that’s great propaganda by the anti-feminist movement but I never knew an Irish woman who would say that.
“It’s the thing that Germaine Greer calls The Female Eunuch, that American women and English women would just expect things that I would not expect like waiting for a car door to be opened for them.
“That feels performative.
“My theory is that it’s because we were such a poor country that a woman being purely decorative was not an option: You’ve got to be shoulder to shoulder with your man at the plough. If he’s harnessing the horses, you’re milking the cows.
“You’ve got to work.
“You can’t pretend to be too dainty or too girly to be able to take care of things.
“And I don’t think it’s considered adorable in our culture whereas it’s only when you get a very prosperous culture can you have women who are infantilised and celebrated for that.
“In our family for many years my father was the sole earner but that meant my mother fixed the car and got us to school and drove us, did all those things.
“She was very practical and able even if he was the main earner.
“You can’t be precious in an economy, until very recently the Irish economy was, where you’re just making it.
“We talk about making do and mending and that quality was a very valued quality in Irish society up until the 90s, being able to keep a car going or being able to darn something and not need a new coat, all of those kind of things.
“That was considered a positive quality in a partner and something you would have sought out as opposed to being kind of, ‘I don’t know how, I’m just a girl’.
“I also think it’s really important because when women opt out of exercising their strength, it puts a burden on men that men should not be carrying alone.
“If you’re a straight man and you’re the only breadwinner in your family and you feel responsible for your partner and your children and that’s on you and you alone, that’s a huge burden.
“I’ve had times where I was struggling to earn a living but I never thought, ‘That makes me a failure as a woman’ whereas men in that situation feel like failures as men.
“We saw men in 2008 taking their own lives because they didn’t know who they were if they weren’t earners and that’s appalling.
“There was so much more to those people than temporarily not having an income.
“And it’s not just about material things.
“If a man feels like he’s got to be a tower of strength emotionally, he should also have a strong pair of arms that says, ‘Are you okay, baby? Let me take care of you. Let me carry the load a bit’, whether that’s financial or emotional or mental.
“When we get into gender roles, men suffer terribly and so the image of women going, ‘That’s okay. We can do this on this occasion. We can rise to it’ is also liberating for men, I hope.”
I don’t want to spoil the story- but it’s been viewed 1.3 million times so I think it’s okay to talk about- but at the end there is a moving incident where your sister, inexplicably, receives a beautiful text message from your father. Of course he had passed and was buried and typed that message while he was still alive but the beauty was that for some strange reason, it arrived at that time and the content of it was really beautiful in that context.
Some could be sceptical or say it means nothing but it’s lovely to think there is something spiritual behind such things..
“I’ve always believed there’s something but it’s also hard when we’re on this side not to tell ourselves, ‘Oh, you’re imagining things. You’re being daft, you’re taking comfort from mysticism and woolliness’.
“But I think it’s significant that my sister Rebecca is the one who received that text message but I was the one of her five sisters she rang.
“Whether she consciously made that choice or not she knew that I was the one who would tell her, ‘You absolutely must believe. You do not get a gift like that and throw it away’, whereas maybe some of my other sisters would have been like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a coincidence’.
“It is funny.
“The night before the Moth in LA I was running it with a friend of mine and I couldn’t finish it.
“I didn’t know how to land it and I was running long and my friend just said to me, ‘Do you know what? Your subconscious knows how to tell this story but your conscious doesn’t so we’re going to stop working at it’.
“And she said, ‘What you’re going to do now is go to bed’.
“She said, ‘Go to bed and when you go to bed, say a little prayer’.
“And she said, ‘Don’t pray to win. You’re going to pray to honour the story and give the people what they came out for’.
“I had nothing else and so I did what she suggested.
“And when I woke up in the morning, it was so clear.
“It was my voice but still it went, ‘It’s not a story about your father, it’s a story about your sisters’.
“Then it all fell into place.
“And it started with my parents but I really talk about, ‘Here’s what it’s like to have five sisters, to be one of six and then falling apart and then being like, ‘No, we can carry the coffin, that’s gonna fix everything and we’ll feel great and we’ll feel so proud of ourselves and we’ll have honoured our father’.
“And then the awful truth being no, we still fell apart and then the text message reconstituted us.”
There are various themes in the show. Different stories deal with themes such as childhood innocence, tragedy, betrayal and much more..
“Yeah, the first story is about misadventures in dating.
“But I had to write something. There was an award in the Edinburgh Fringe that we were eligible for.
“But I didn’t really realise that the first story is about dating and it’s kind of fun and games.
“And the next one actually is about moving to London.
“It’s about being frightened and overwhelmed because London’s such an enormous city.
“But as the show goes on, there’s then a story about my grandmother, who was English, and her relationship with a German soldier during the Second World War.
“It goes a little deeper.
“And then there’s a story about a Calais refugee that I met and how he changed my life.
“It goes a little deeper and a little darker every step of the way which I hadn’t really realised until I sat down to write about it.
“But right at the end, I probably share the thing that’s most vulnerable but I do it really carefully and I always think it’s okay because by the time I tell you this, you’ve been with me for an hour and you know I’m okay.
“I do go to quite a dark place.
“I do go there and that’s pretty dark but like I say by then people know I’m okay so I’m not asking them to hold a space for my trauma.
“I’m just going, ‘This is a part of my experience too but here I am on stage and I’m living and I’m quite evidently not just surviving but thriving.”
You have been nominated for Best Solo Performance at the Outer Critics Circle awards in New York. You must be stoked with that..
“It’s surreal.
“It feels like everything that’s happened with this show has been extraordinary.
“I am not a professional performer.
“The Moth is for people who are not professional performers and I love that.
“There’s something so democratic about it: If you want to get up on stage and tell a story, fill your boots.
“I got up on stage 11 years ago and I told a story and that built to two and a half years ago I was in a little space in a great theatre in Dublin but I took the smaller space, not the bigger space.
“I was like, ‘I’m gonna see if I can do this’.
“And that went really well.
“We got amazing reviews.
“If I had written my own reviews, they wouldn’t have been as good as that because they saw things that I didn’t.
“We sold out.
“We sold out because I kind of said to everybody I’ve ever known, ‘You better come to my show’.
“But even so, the word of mouth was very good, and the theatre was like, ‘Let’s have you back in the bigger space’.
“And we sold out the bigger space.
“And then we went on tour and then we went to Edinburgh, and then we got invited to New York and we did four weeks.
“We sold out in New York for four weeks.
“The box office staff said to me, ‘This is unprecedented’.
“They were like, ‘We’ve got a wait list so long. We’ve never had anything like it’.
“I said to my brother-in-law, who’s a film producer, ‘Who knew I had performer in me?’
“And he went, ‘Absolutely everybody who knows you knew that you had that in you’.
“But it’s also kind of interesting because I’m well into my middle age to be discovering this thing that I can do and that people want to see and people are going, ‘What’s next?’
“I have an idea for another show, but I’m going to tour this till the wheels come off.”
Making a Show of Myself is at Irish Cultural Centre Friday 22- Saturday 23 May.
For booking and more information, click here.
