From the very start of our conversation Deirdre O’Kane is characteristically shy and vague about her requirements.
“I want a big picture,” she declares. Instead, I offer her some big words, which I sometimes can get by the editor. A massive photospread is not, I explain, within my gift. The demand is in no way withdrawn. “I don’t care. I want a big picture”.
It’s not surprising. O'Kane is a performer who has always known precisely what she wants from her career. Partly because of her drive and clarity, she will usually get it.
Yet, as we discuss her return to live comedy after taking a year out to have her daughter, it becomes apparent that her comeback was by no means a sure thing.
When she quit work six months into her pregnancy, O’Kane was perhaps a little jaded with stand up. She admits: “I had a love-hate relationship with stand up. So I did use the pregnancy as an ‘out’.”
Plying your trade on stage was, she reckoned, not the ideal preparation for child-birth. “But I left the door open. I never said never.”
To the outsider, it might seem odd that someone with O’Kane’s successful live career would even look for an exit.
She could fill the big venues here and enjoyed a high profile as a result of leading roles in Paths To Freedom and Fergus’s Wedding, as well as starring with Colin Farrell and Colm Meany in the feature Intermission.
All of this merely demonstrates that anyone at any level of success can become exhausted by the demands of being funny alone on stage.
Having said that, once it bites you, the comedy bug can be awfully persistent. And with her daughter safely and successfully arrived, O’Kane began to feel the force of that old comedy gravity.
“I felt like I had something to say again,” she says. “And I’m enjoying it a lot more now. I’m less interested in what others think. I no longer care what other comics think, what critics think. This time I want to enjoy it more.”
Being a parent, it is clear, changes a comedian’s perspective. Can the thrill of live performance compare with the thrill of raising your own offspring? We both agree that it cannot and that most (single) comedians simply don’t appreciate this.
Having received The Call, O’Kane has returned to the coalface in a quiet way, trying out her new material in the smaller clubs ahead of higher-profile outings. The latter include a slot at Kilkenny Arts Festival and a headline performance at The Laughter Lounge at the Roisin Dubh, Galway.
She pronounces herself extremely satisfied with her new material. Nonetheless, testing untried jokes on an audience can be traumatic.
It hardly helps that a lot of her new material is, not surprisingly, about babies and motherhood. Which isn’t exactly the sort of thing they’re used to on, say, the Dublin stand-up circuit.
However, it’s precisely that shift of emphasis in her life, which seems to have given O'Kane the conviction that she has something new to talk about and which thereby provided the impetus for her to get back on stage.
Going back to work can often help a new mother reassert her professional independence. Yet, O’Kane won’t find escaping parenthood all that easy. For starters, she will be grappling with the subject in Fiona Looney’s new play, Dandelions, which she starts rehearsing in October.
“The play is really about Career Mom versus Stay-at-Home Mom,” O’Kane says. “And it has a star-studded cast [including] Pauline McGlynn and Keith Duffy.”
The play opens at The Olympia, Dublin and will be just part of a multimedia Deirdre-fest in the autumn.
She has two films coming out as well. She’s in Annie Griffin’s Festival, a tale of off-stage trauma set in the Edinburgh Fringe, for which O’Kane was presumably able to draw heavily on her own fringe experiences.
However, the comedian’s grade-A enthusiasm is reserved for husband Stephen Bradley’s forthcoming Boy Eats Girl – a “Romantic Zomedy” also starring Samantha Mumba.
The movie, in which a boy declares his love for his girlfriend, only to die the same night and be brought back to life by his mother as a flesh-craving zombie, ran into problems with the censor and its planned debut at the Galway Film Fleadh was postponed. Re-rated 15A on appeal, the movie will shortly receive its Irish premiere.
O’Kane’s new set doesn’t yet have a name. She is using the working title of Deirdre O’Kane Rides Again, but doesn’t really like it.
She engages me for a brief brainstorm, which yields only Terrorists.Oxygen.Publicity.
It’s zeitgeisty enough but has absolutely nothing to do with babies and motherhood and would therefore be a bit misleading.
After this effort and some sad attempts by me to crow-bar “Post Partem” into a title, I am fired as creative branding consultant. O’Kane will come up with precisely the right thing for the job anyway, because that’s what she does.b
Deirdre O’Kane Rides Again is at The Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny at 8pm on Monday 15th August as part of the Kilkenny Arts Week.