Our roundup of festival highlights from Fringe 2013 concludes with Maeve Higgins’ Moving City.
It’s been the year of Maeve. After the launch of her first book We Have a Good Time… Don’t We she’s become an Irish Times columnist and has now moved to London. She talks about the transition from writing stand-up to writing a play and her complicated break-up with Dublin.
It’s the first time you’ve written a play – you do stand-up and you write, but this brings the two together. Did you feel you were falling between two stools, or that you were strengthened by having a foot in both camps?
I write a lot but my needy egomaniac side still needs lights, attention, and the applause of strangers – so I haul myself up on stage whenever I can – to feel alive for a fleeting moment before I return to the drudgery of conversations where I have to let the other party speak too. All writing and performing is kind of the same though, it’s a way of saying ‘I feel like this, do you?’
Why did you decide to write a play instead of doing one of your shows as normal? What’s the difference?
My stand up is very spontaneous, sometimes people think I just wandered on to the stage and started talking, which is kind of true. Anyway, I wanted to try a more ‘written’ show. I talked about it with Roise, the Fringe Director, and she suggested trying a more collaborative approach. She set me up with Gina Moxley as a dramaturg (she basically drags things out of me, eats scones and says really funny things) and Una McKevitt as a director (she is the brains behind Victor and Gourd and Singlehood) so making this show is very exciting and feels different for me. So that’s one way the process has changed. But the main thing is whereas I usually perform in the nip – for this play I’ll be more or less fully clothed.
You’re calling this an open love letter to Dublin who you broke up with. Why are you still in love with Dublin?
After 12 years, I moved to London from Dublin. I don’t know if I’ve moved too far, or not far enough. I feel I’m still close by, and like any creepy ex-girlfriend, I keep track of Dublin through social media and thinly veiled questions to our mutual friends. I suspect my heart is trapped under an old shopping trolley in the Liffey, being guarded by some old Tallaght carp.
Where do you live in London? What’s the weirdest thing you’ve had to adapt to?
I live in Hackney, in a neighbourhood full of Victorian-looking gentlemen riding fixed wheel bikes in tiny jeans past elderly Cypriot men and me, shaking our heads slowly as we sit drinking on our stoops. I like it, though there are chicken bones all over the ground. The weirdest thing about London, for me, is not knowing anybody and nobody knowing me. Some days I love that and skip around the streets like a dopey lamb. Other days I think ‘Wow – I could unravel here and it wouldn’t change a thing’ – then I get to skipping as quickly as I can.
Moving City debuts at Fringe 2013 on September 17th at 7pm (€14) and runs from September 18th to 21st with nightly shows at 7pm (€18/16 conc.) at the Smock Alley Theatre.
