Out of body experience

Guna Nua Theatre company’s latest production has a fascinating and contentious, premise: the notion that the artists who uses body parts of dead people to better “authenticate” his art is no more of a cannibal than the social diarist who uses the lives of celebrities, and friends, to fill her weekly newspaper column.

Paul Meade’s play Skin Deep is being co-produced with One Productions media company, which means the show will rely heavily on “cinematic” techniques, using video projections and sound design. One Productions work, incidentally, has been featured in Fashion TV, RTRs Off the Rails and No Disco and in various magazines from hotpress to Social And Personal.

So what’s this “fast moving, humorous adventure with a dark twist” that “raises questions of morality, celebrity and the value of friendship”, all about, Paul?

“Well, the journalist’s moral dilemma is that she is cabbibalising her own life to fill the column, as in ‘who-I-met-out-at-the-night-club-last-night’ thing,” Meade explains. “Then she develops an illness and uses that just like John Diamond wrote about his cancer. So there is a critique of the social diarist. She also has a relationship with a photographer, in advertising, and she uses their relationship in her diary, though she doesn’t use his name. She just calls him ‘The Photographer’, a bit like A.A. Gill says ‘The Blond.’ Or Terry Keane called Charlie Haughey, ‘sweetie’. And it becomes a love triangle because there is a student involved.”

Sounds a little like Sex In The City too. But there’s more. This photographer, who lives in Dublin, shares a studio with an artist and it’s in a variation of that artist’s tale that Meade got his original idea for this play.

“You may have read about this,” he continues, rhetorically. “There was actually an artist who made a deal with a lab technician, in the Royal Medical School in London, to take some body parts away. And he paid the lab assistant. And used those body parts in his art. He freely publicised this fact and he ended up being convicted of misappropriating body parts! So that story really caught my attention. And the main thrust of Skin Deep is exploring the human relationship with our body – alive and dead – how we deal with that and how we think about it, perceive it. Reading that story, in the paper, and looking at performance artists and thinking of how they use their own bodies in their work and journalists use their own lives just fell into place as this play.”

Finally, the million-euro question: Is Paul Meade a cannibal?

“I haven’t really thought about it in relation to myself but if this play works maybe we’ll make money for it!” he responds, laughing.”But I think this theme is timeless. And it raises a huge moral question for all of us. Not just artists and journalists. So it will be interesting to see how audiences respond after the play opens. I’m certainly looking forward to getting audience response.”