Remember to press play above to listen to Tripe + Drisheen’s podcast interview with Fin Flynn.
Fin Flynn might have worked in theatre for over 20 years, but she isn’t all that comfortable on a stage.
I’m taking her photograph after our interview and I ask her to hop on the Cork Arts Theatre (CAT Club) stage for a snap, which she tolerates with good humour and a degree of discomfort. She’s not one for the limelight.
“Did you ever act yourself?” I ask her.
“Oh no, never. I mean, once,” she says, and recounts her childhood foray onto the boards at Feis Maitiú in Fr Mathew Hall, where she played the druid Getafix in an Asterix play penned by her classmates: “It was terrible, we were awful,” she says with a laugh.
Behind the scenes is where Flynn has built her career, in theatre production and admin.
“It’s mainly a supporting role, my role,” she says. “I’ve so much respect for performers. It’s a very hard career.”
At third level, Flynn studied English and German in UCC, and, with no notion of working in theatre or even the arts, “worked in an accountancy firm and then in PR in the UK. It was only when I came back to Cork in the mid-nineties that I decided I’d like to work in the arts.”
She hit it lucky, joining Corcadorca on a Community Employment scheme just in time for their 1995 production of A Clockwork Orange in Sir Henry’s, a year before the Cork-based company would blow Irish theatre off its hinges with Disco Pigs, the play that launched Cillian Murphy’s acting career and set Pat Kiernan’s fledgling company on course to specialise in critically acclaimed site-specific, ambitious, spectacle-heavy productions for many years.
By 2003, she was manager at Corcadorca.
A €70,000 boost for the CAT Club
A move to the newly created role of Manager at Cork Arts Theatre comes with its own excitement for Flynn, as you’ll hear in the podcast interview, as well as adjustments in moving away from the peripatetic pattern of Corcadorca’s site-specific extravaganzas and planting her feet firmly in one place, one venue.
Covid restrictions hit the intimate 100-seat CAT Club hard: by November of 2020, I was writing about the €20,000 crowdfunding campaign that artistic director Dolores Mannion had launched to try to keep the theatre on its feet and pay the bills. With their focus on community and non-professional theatre, they were ineligible for the emergency funding provided to theatres through the Arts Council.
But help was at hand: last year, a benefactor, who does not want to be identified, donated €300,000 to The Community Foundation for Ireland to support the arts, particularly visual arts.
The Foundation in turn awarded €70,000 to Cork Arts Theatre to support a new programme under the banner Creative Empowerment, the brainchild of outgoing director Dolores Mannion.
Creative Empowerment
The resulting Creative Empowerment programme launches next week - Tuesday, February 22 - and the diverse programme of shows runs from March to November: ten theatrical works designed to “make you laugh, cry, or question the status quo,” according to the press release.
Work by playwrights including Jack Thorne and Bridget O’Connor will be brought to the stage by local production companies, while freshly penned plays by emerging authors will also feature.
The Dominion of Fancy is a dark musical cabaret performed by Dominic Moore, Victoria Keating and Mark Wilkins that includes elements of opera, puppetry, projection and live music. Cork actress and writer Irene Kelleher returns to the stage with Wake, in which she plays Lily, “not quite your typical mourner,” at her mother’s wake.
This 2022 programme was in place before Flynn’s appointment; “The first year is more or less programmed which is great because it gives me a year where I don’t have to rush into things,” she says.
For 2023, Flynn has big ambitions, including building on the theatre’s reputation as a stage on which to cut your teeth: she wants to see the theatre used as an intimate music venue and more.
They’re exciting times, and Flynn is already getting settled in.
“There’s a great team of people here and they’ve given me a great welcome,” she says. “It’s funny: I feel really at home here already.”
The Creative Empowerment launch takes place at 6pm on Tuesday, February 22 in the CAT Club, Carroll’s Quay, Cork. Watch out for up and coming plays in the programme by checking the theatre website.
CAT woman