Pea Dinneen: ‘Raising Her Voice was born out of frustration at seeing myself reflected nowhere in the Irish theatrical canon'

Irish Times

3 hours ago

Part cabaret, part pop spectacle and part blistering social commentary wrapped in rhinestones, Pea Dinneen's Dublin Fringe Festival debut is many things at once, just like its creator.
A trans woman with a voice that's lower than audiences might expect, a musical-theatre nerd with an anti-establishment streak, and a self-described 'disenfranchised millennial hag', Dinneen is singing her way through the contradictions of identity, politics and belonging in modern Ireland.
But Raising Her Voice isn't just an autobiographical show about gender: it's also a reclamation of cultural space. 'Raising Her Voice was born out of the frustration of being a cabaret singer and reluctant theatre performer who was met with a canon of work that, despite everyone telling me it was brilliant and to revere it – that the Irish canon is one of the great theatrical canons – I saw myself reflected nowhere in it,' the 34-year-old says.
'Despite how tied to tradition our country is, no Oscar Wilde, no Seán O'Casey could have anticipated that in 2025 a trans woman would want to make declarations about the country she grew up in on stage.'
READ MORE
Dinneen uses hit songs to disarm audiences who might arrive with narrow ideas of femininity, performance or Irishness. 'There's a lot of sugar in the pill,' she says. 'I will take a message that this audience might not think they're capable of digesting, but I will present it to the music of Gwen Stefani or Marina and the Diamonds, and suddenly it goes down a lot easier.
'The show is about me singing with a deep voice as a woman. The opening number begins, they hear me sing, and then I greet them, and I say, 'Hello, Ireland. My name is Pea Dinneen, and that's what my voice sounds like.' That, for me, is a very quick invitation for them to lean forward and go, 'What else do I not know about this country? What else is going on that I'm not party to? And how is this woman going to invite me in?''
Raising Her Voice tracks her three visits to the
National Gender Service
and other key moments in her life: trying to pronounce the modh coinníollach
– the Irish language's conditional mood – as a child, or voting in the abortion referendum in 2018. These moments are connected to her generation's experience of growing up in a boom-and-bust Ireland, and the impact that has had on identity, ambition and rage.
'The financial crash happened when I was 18 years old,' she says. 'Heading out into the world after a childhood of being told I can be anything I want, suddenly I was being told, 'No actually, you can't be that at all.' It felt like a broken promise.'
Dinneen grew up both within and outside Irish privilege. She went to a 'classic south Dublin private all-boys rugby-playing school' but rarely attended. Knowing she was trans from a young age, she regarded the school's hallmarks of privilege and exclusion as clashing with her queer identity.
'As soon as I hit puberty, and I knew I was trans and needed to transition, I just couldn't face going into a school that was hallmarked by the idea that our parents had all decided to pay a certain amount of money in order to remove us from certain portions of society. Leaving school at that time, I knew I no longer had to try and fit into those boxes.'
Paradoxically, her class background offered her both alienation and safety. When she left school she was able to live with her parents. 'That comfort and that time gave me the space to find myself and to find my queer expression. If I was struggling to survive financially, I probably wouldn't have had that space.'
She's acutely aware of how systems of privilege shape who gets to make art. 'If I go to someone who is the director of a building or arts organisation, I know how to articulate myself in a way that maybe your average transgender woman without a Leaving Cert wouldn't know how. That level of code-switching, that knowledge of unseen social structures that you get from being brought up within them, it's definitely helped me.'
Dinneen is unsparing on this point about privilege, money and art, addressing the way the conventions of funding bodies often limit how radical or inclusive art can be.
'So much 'queer work' at a certain level of funding isn't queer at all: it's populated by gym-fit, able-bodied, conventionally attractive people who happen to be gay. That's not queer to me.'
In opposition to these norms and limitations, the cabaret collective she founded with Aoife Sweeney O'Connor, the cult favourite
Egg
, was defiantly by and for queers. 'We didn't have to explain ourselves to the audience. That was the power. That was the point.'
Dinneen says that Raising Her Voice is already breaking boundaries for trans representation on the Irish stage. 'I think I'm right in saying that my show at Fringe this year will be the first time a show by a trans artist has been platformed at that scale in this country.'
Still, pushing against the margins comes at a cost. Dinneen has been assaulted in transphobic attacks twice in the past year. She points out that despite having the second-highest GDP per capita in Europe, Ireland ranks worst in the EU for trans healthcare.
'That contradiction tells you everything,' she says. 'It's not that most people are actively transphobic. It's just that changing systems takes work – and I don't think people are ready to have those conversations, let alone do the work.'
Dinneen urges people who support trans folk to take action to show the Government that the support is there. 'If you believe you don't have any problem or prejudice against trans people, take a tiny action to prove that. Write to your TD. Ask your GP why they won't do blood tests for trans people who are self-medicating. Small actions matter.'
Despite the challenges and obstacles, Dinneen has hope. More importantly, she has plans. In the autumn she will premiere a second show, Cool Suburban Mam, this time at Dublin Theatre Festival.
A comedy of manners set in a posh south Dublin school, it centres on a trans sex worker trying to navigate the social institutions she has bought her way into. 'It satirises class guilt, code-switching and what happens when you can afford to belong – but still don't,' she explains.
Even as she ascends to prominence, Dinneen is focused on building scaffolding for others. Dinneen led the Trans­form­ing Stages devel­op­ment pro­gramme with the
Out­burst
queer arts fes­ti­val, the first the­atre men­tor­ship pro­gramme in Ire­land specif­i­cally for trans and nonbinary theatre makers.
'It's all well and good to have one trans artist who's thriving so that everyone else can point to her and say, 'Look, we did the work – aren't we great?'' Dinneen says. 'But if you aren't building for the future canon, if you aren't putting the resources in place to make sure that writers who don't come from as privileged a background as I do have the same opportunities, then all you're doing is endorsing a status quo.'
Dinneen's commitment to systemic change is clear. But so is her joy. Her recent marriage to the artist May Watson was a riot of colour, celebration and tenderness. 'I never thought I'd get married,' she says. 'You don't see trans women get married in media, so I never thought it was viable. But then it just felt right.'
She credits her marriage with giving her a kind of creative propulsion. 'There's something about being seen by another woman – being loved and supported through that – that gave me such confidence,' she says. 'I don't think it's a coincidence that my career is taking off now.'
Pea Dinneen: Raising Her Voice is at Project Arts Centre, as part of
Dublin Fringe Festival
, on September 6th-7th and 11th-14th. Cool Suburban Mom is at the same venue, as part of
Dublin Theatre Festival
, on October 3rd