Emer Dineen brings 0800-Cupid home to Cork for Midsummer Fest
Emer says the show slides between fantasy and reality, taking the audience on a heady ride.
For actor, writer and cabaret star, Emer Dineen, bringing the musical extravaganza to the Everyman, is very much a homecoming.
London-based Emer was born in Cork, but moved to the UK metropolis as a baby with her parents; actor Peter Dineen, who recently died, and writer Kate Corkery.
Peter, who started his career at the Everyman, co-wrote with the late Jim McKeon. His successful career saw him tread the boards of the National Theatre in London for ten years as well as popping up on TV series such as
Emer considers Cork to be ‘home’.
The family, including her brother Fintan, a writer, still has a house in Passage West.
is produced by THISISPOPBABY, an innovative company that traverses high art, pop culture and counterculture. It was first staged at the Project Arts Centre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2024, where it was hailed as ‘unmissable.’
The show is largely autobiographical, says Emer, who describes her creation, directed and developed by Philip McMahon, as a diaspora success story and the fulfilment of the emigrant’s dream. Her parents moved the family to London in the 1980s to seek out a better life. Emer is bringing the story of that life home to Cork and around the country on a tour.
It is described as a ‘queer opus’ about the chaos of life in London’s nightlife and also a love letter to Peter, who was cared for by Emer during his dementia journey.
“I think there is no greater privilege than to be able to look after someone who has invested so much in looking after you,” says Emer.
Peter was from the Blackpool area of Cork. He worked at a lot of jobs, including pawn broking and factory work as well as the building sites in London. In the evenings, he worked in commercial art and attended drama school in London.
“He worked doggedly. He always wanted to be an actor. He was always creative, making art and writing short stories. He started working as an actor in his twenties and had a lot of success.”
Emer’s mother is a descendant of the writer Daniel Corkery. Her work includes a book called .
Emer reckons her own talent is partly innate and partly due to her parents. “I feel very lucky to have had two very strong examples of artists as parents who managed to make the artistic life work for them.”
The genesis of was “a feeling of post-pandemic confusion and isolation, and a constellation of very strange things that happened in a year of my life. It includes moving into an apartment with thousands of bees living in the vent on my kitchen wall.”
How did she get rid of them? “Come and see the show to find out.”
Emer also got a diagnosis of Tourette’s Syndrome. “That’s all in the show. It was certainly a kind of catalyst for a lot of the subject matter that we explore in the show. It was a very unexpected diagnosis.”
The show also sees Emer’s character losing her job in a call centre. That did not happen in real life, but Emer says the notion of such a centre as a place where capitalism and isolation combine to reveal entrapment in the metropolis was important. She speaks of living life online with its associated elements of misinformation.
“There were feelings of dissociation coming out of the pandemic, and trying to understand what it was to get back into work. I think there are a lot of things from the pandemic that we’re still kind of processing.”
While Emer says London is an exciting, varied and colourful city to live in, it can be “strangely isolating as well. The theme of isolation in the show is more related to the global impact of it than my own personal experience. It’s quite a universal story about loss rooted in queer underground culture.”
Describing the show as high in energy, Emer says it slides between fantasy and reality, taking audiences on a heady ride through a surreal chapter in her life. It has soaring vocals and features a live band.
“It unfolds as a high-octane queer party, capturing both the thrill and the quiet anxiety of being untethered in your twenties.”
The stage is transformed into an “avant-garde nightclub-meets-concert experience.”
The image that kept coming into Emer’s head was that of Cupid being alive today. “Cupid would be walking around disoriented and confused by modern life.” (Cupid is Emer’s alter ego in the show.)
, which features two other performers and a band of three musicians, started as a cabaret act. “It has very strong roots in drag and cabaret and underground culture. It’s a mixture of a musical, a concert and a theatre show. It’s about the unexpected happening as well as sometimes funny and confusing events.”
Emer is well-versed in theatre. Before training at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, she worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London International Theatre Festival. She is looking forward to coming ‘home’ and is dedicating to the memory of her father.
is at the Everyman from June 18-19.
See: www.everymancork.com.
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