“WE made Phoebe Waller-Bridge cry,” is not a confession I expected to hear when I sat down with the creators of award-winning theatre company SkelpieLimmer, Seón Simpson and Gina Donnelly.
“We performed our first show Two Fingers Up in the Irish Cultural Centre in London and Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Martin McDonagh came to see it,” Gina recalls.
“And at the end they both cried, and they both stood, and I just melted into a puddle - it was such a lovely and surreal moment,” adds Seón.
Taking their name from a term used in Robert Burns’ poem Halloween to describe a misbehaving child the duo believe SkelpieLimmer perfectly encapsulates the ethos of their company.
“It took us ages to pick a name,” laughs Gina.
“But when we first performed Two Fingers Up there was a lot of people telling us we couldn’t say and do certain things, and we didn’t really know what we were doing.
“So, when we came across SkelpieLimmer we felt like it very much encapsulated the spirit we wanted to keep of playfulness, rebelliousness and chaos.”
Specialising in funny, explicit but oddly life-affirming theatre, both Gina and Seón believe that by tackling contentious issues through comedy and play audiences will find it easier to discuss them afterwards.
“Whenever we came out of university it was in the aftermath of the feminist movement and a lot of theatre was coming out about sexual assault and violence against women,” Seón describes.
“And a lot of it seemed to centre around really traumatic and re-triggering restagings of those issues.
“So, you’d go to the theatre on a Friday night with your friends and it would be a really graphic portrayal of that story.
“And we kind of felt that the conversations people were having in the bar afterwards were leaning more towards how shocking it was rather than the socio-economic implications of it or why we live in a society where it’s not taken seriously when women come out and speak about these things.”
The duo penned Two Fingers Up in 2018, a plucky and thought-provoking play about female empowerment (and satisfaction) aiming to shine a light on Northern Ireland’s lacklustre relationships and sexuality education.
“With Two Fingers Up it was really important for us to create a piece of theatre that addressed those issues but also was a safe space for someone who had maybe been a victim of sexual assault,” Seón continues.
Gina adds: “It doesn’t force your hand, it goes around those issues of consent, poor sex education and conservatism but it doesn’t directly stage any of that or address it so that people can choose what they talk about after.
“If people only want to focus on the surface level stuff like how funny it is to walk into Ann Summers for the first time or their own sex ed they can do that but if they want to talk about the deeper issues they can as well.”
Since the success of Two Fingers Up, the pair have continued to create, collaborate and champion less traditional forms of theatre. In 2023 they took Colm McCready’s solo show Scaredy Fat to the Edinburgh Fringe and are currently supporting his next project, Shame Show.
“Scaredy Fat and Shame Show in particular really fit in with what we’re about,” says Seón.
“We like to take on quite big political topics but through the lens of comedy and when the opportunity to work on Scaredy Fat came about Colm had been offered the Artist At Work programme as part of Dublin Fringe.
“They basically give you space for a week and you can invite anyone you want in to see your work and he invited us in to have a read of an early draft of Scaredy.
“After that reading I was driving Gina home and we just looked at each other and went ‘this just feels like a SkelpieLimmer show’ because it was talking about fat phobia, homophobia and horror films but it was so funny and had so much joy in it.
“That was very much how we felt about Two Fingers Up - it was talking about so much, but joy was such a central part of the production and I think that’s what we look for.
“We look for people that are trying to say something really serious but give an audience an equally entertaining experience.”
They are also currently working in collaboration with Brassneck Theatre Company on Gina’s new play, Anthem For Dissatisfaction.
“Because I wrote Anthem and it’s my thing, my focus has been on it for a lot of the year,” Gina explains.
“I’m very proud of it but now it’s nice to kind of be in someone else’s creative space where we’re helping to shape something new.
“I like working on a range of things and Scaredy Fat and Shame Show have been great because they use a lot of styles that I wasn’t really familiar with so there’s a nice creative learning process in that.”
Gina and Seón believe uncensored theatre that provokes change and starts conversations is vital to the arts, particularly in Northern Ireland.
“A lot of artists here in the nineties and noughties felt like they could only be taken seriously if they mined the trauma from the Troubles and put it on stage in a very serious way,” says Gina.
“But I guess both of us were kind of looking further afield than Northern Irish theatre and wanted to show that actually you can be taken very seriously doing comedy and having fun and personally we think that’s a better place for an audience to be in.
“It’s also something Irish people do very well so it’s weird that it hasn’t been that prevalent in theatre here at home.”
Going forward the pair hope to continue their creative crusade against the theatrical norm and produce work that will make audiences react in a big way, be it anger, sadness, happiness, lust, freedom or confusion, while always retaining that sense of mischief and fun.
“I don’t think we have one specific goal,” adds Gina.
“Theatre is so special to us, and I love that idea of a show only existing once because every performance is different so if we can keep that notion alive, keep touring and telling stories that matter and are important I think we’d be really happy.”
