Pictures of you

There are some things you never forget. If you’re a guy, maybe it’s the first time you saw a woman nude. Or maybe the last time you saw two childhood buddies walk away the day before you read in a newspaper that they’d been found dead in a pond.

Both these memories are ingrained in the mind of visual artist Gary Coyle, whose one-man show Death In Dun Laoghaire was for this writer one of the highlights of last year’s Dublin Fringe Festival, not only because I grew up in Glasthule, near Dun Laoghaire, and recognised most of the areas Coyle photographed and uses as slides during the show, but because the show itself is deliciously dark and funny, almost like a Smiths song. It kicks off with Gary’s memory of that drowning in Moran’s Park in Dun Laoghaire.
“It begins with that incident because I remember it so vividly to the day,” he says. “I was playing in the Peoples’ Park and the last thing I remember is these two guys walking off on the path towards the seafront, especially the tallest, with a red jumper tied around his vest. They were in my brother’s class in school and we used to play with them. Back in the ‘70s kids could roam freely all over the city. We lived on the other side of town but we were in the park playing with these kids and they said, ‘Do you want to come and rob eggs?’ and we said, ‘No, we have to go home.’
“But what I remember mostly is my mom telling me the following day that they were dead. And I was just learning how to read at the time, so I remember looking at the story in my parent’s newspaper. So the first thing I ever read, apart from a schoolbook, was about the death of these two boys, and the impact of that never left me. It was just the idea of, you see these two kids one minute and the next minute they’re dead.”
That said, Gary admits that although he is glad he did Death in Dun Laoghaire at last year’s Fringe Festival, he had never performed before a group of people, and finds the prospect of doing it again quite terrifying. And even though the original writing of the script was somewhat therapeutic, it’s far from therapeutic doing the show itself.
“But I love writing,” he says, “and I think that one of the reasons this show works is that there is this whole tradition of storytelling in Ireland and that’s exactly what I’m doing. Isn’t it what we all do when we have a couple of jars, sit around with a couple of mates and tell stories? My favourite night in the world is when I am with four or five close friends and we get drunk and tell each other stories, make each other laugh, so my show is an extension of that, as well as, I guess, giving a talk about my art. But I wrote it all five years ago out of raw terror and I was too scared to do anything with it. Anytime I was gong to do something with it I backed off, but eventually I said, ‘Fuck it’ and just went for it.”
All the stories in the show, says Coyle, are about death in some way, apart from that memory of a naked woman in Dun Laoghaire baths.
“I probably didn’t get over either!” he laughs.
But the incident also functions as a device to tell stories about Dun Laoghaire itself, a town that Coyle believes has changed drastically of late - and not for the better.
“All of Ireland has changed, but the southside of Dublin has changed in particular over the last 15 years,“ he suggests. “Dalkey has become a place where the working class has become an endangered species, y’know? And that’s happened all over the southside. Everybody has been shoved out, and that gets in my tits. So I’m marking something that is either going, or in some cases, gone. So maybe it’s about the death of Dun Laoghaire too!”