Death And The Maiden Aunt

Risteard Cooper sure is riding high these days. Not just as a result of Après Match, which he co-writes, but because he’s recently made the challenging leap from playing mostly comedic roles to relatively straight parts in plays like The Eccentricities Of A Nightingale and See You Next Tuesday at the Gate Theatre and Doldrum Bay at the Peacock. Now he’s appearing at the Gaiety Theatre in Morris Panych’s black-comedy Auntie And Me. Pretty impressive.

So what’s Auntie And Me all about? In a nutshell, a relatively young guy hears his aunt is dying, goes to her bedside, but seemingly can’t wait for her to pass on so he can claim her inheritance. But there’s more to the character of Kemp, says Risteard, speaking to me straight after rehearsals for the play.

“He’s a fairly mad character, brutally honest about how he feels about the aunt,” he says. “But that brutality doesn’t come out of nowhere. He comes from a very dysfunctional background. He’s had virtually no relationship with his parents, at all, particularly his mother. In fact, his parents are both dead. His father committed suicide and he’s a loner. And though he does go to her thinking about the inheritance, his aunt is the only person who ever really meant anything to him in his life. So there are all those layers to it.”
Meaning Kemp isn’t just an opportunist?
“Well, that is something the audience will have to make their own minds up about,” claims Risteard. “The longer she stays alive, the more it become a source of frustration to him and he plans to kill her in different ways. But throughout the journey of the story he begins to learn a bit more about her and about himself, and about his past. So there are moments of self realisation and self revelation in this play.”
But if the theme of Auntie And Me involves a young man planning to kill his aunt, that surely is, overall, a black, black, comedy.

“It is,” says Risteard. “In ways, it’s extremely black. And what I find really interesting – and really funny – about Auntie And Me, is that it is relentlessly edgy, relentlessly black. It’s therefore really good fun to play, because you can play it for truth, and you know the more you opt to do that, the more it’s funny. I generally feel that if you are playing something for laughs you won’t get them. The more you seek laughs out, the more uninteresting it is and the less likely they are to come. But they come in Auntie and Me because the play is, as I say, relentlessly black and that’s how I play it.” b

Auntie And Me, co-starring Anna Manahan, is currently running at the Gaiety