JOHN Connors's debut play Ireland's Call may share its name with Phil Coulter's patriotic song, which has been used in place of a national anthem by the Irish Rugby Football Union, but that is where the similarity ends.
Described by one critic as "a stark anthem to life on the margins", Ireland's Call follows the lives and family histories of three young men as they grow up in Coolock on Dublin’s north side and questions what shapes them and entices them to a life of crime.
"He [Coulter] wrote a few good songs; Ireland's Call isn't one of them. How are we standing shoulder to shoulder when we are constantly being f****d over by the elite?" says 29-year-old Connors.
Developed as part of Show in a Bag, an artist development initiative of the Dublin Fringe Festival, Connors's debut stage drama has toured to 22 venues in Ireland; he has also performed it in New York, Paris, Sydney and Melbourne. Now he's bringing the one-man show to the north for the first time; it opens at the Lyric Theatre this month as part of Belfast International Arts Festival.
The play, directed by Jimmy Smallhorn, delves deep into class, religion and identity in the current Irish landscape, bringing our collective guilts, secrets and flaws to the surface.
Born in London to an Irish Traveller family, Connors moved to Dublin with his family as a baby. His father suffered from depression and schizophrenia, and took his own life when the actor and writer was just eight.
Connors began boxing at a young age because he was being bullied – he's a former three-time Irish boxing champion and a four nations boxing gold medallist.
After giving up the sport in his late teens due to "lack of discipline", he was persuaded to take up acting in a bid to help him battle depression.
"Acting was a life saver for me. You come to where I am and the options are usually only football or boxing. I want people to be more aware of the impact and power of the arts and get the message out that it is for everyone," says Connors, who is proud of his roots and is back living in a Coolock Traveller site.
"When I was getting into it the only Traveller actor I knew was Mickey Collins who was in Glenroe. I went and climbed my own version of Everest and people have seen that and now it's great to see other young Travellers getting into acting."
Connors is best known for his role as pipe bomber Patrick Ward in the RTÉ series Love/Hate – a role he is grateful for as it opened opportunities in acting and activism, using his public profile to speak out about the Traveller community, as well as about racism, abortion and depression.
"It was mad because you have 1.5 million watching you. The overnight exposure was difficult to handle, it was like you were a f***ing Beatle," he recalls of the hit series.
"But it was good for my career and because of that profile I was able to go and make the documentary I Am Traveller, about the Carrickmines tragedy [the 2015 halting-site blaze in which 10 people including a pregnant woman died] and contemporary Traveller life, then another three-part series on Travellers and other documentaries in America with the indigenous people over there."
Ireland’s Call could be seen as an extension of the actor’s role as an advocate – not just for his own Traveller community, but for working-class people and minorities throughout Ireland.
"It’s mostly middle-class people trying to tell working-class stories nowadays and that’s not right. The language of theatre, which is 'show, not tell', creates this unique opportunity for me to say what I have to say about Ireland and the current state that it’s in.
"Ireland's Call is a show about all the ugliness of Ireland, but it's performed in a way that shows the beauty of Ireland –which is seanchaí storytelling, a tradition which is so rich and I hope we never lose it," says Connors, adding there are also moments of humour within the play, whose premise is about three lads dreams of going to Ibiza after watching the movie Kevin & Perry Go Large.
The story is told through the voice of James, a young man who grew up with the stigma of his mother and father being heroin addicts. He has a friend called Patrick, whose father is Nigerian and whose is named after the patron saint of Ireland and Nigeria; the third character has links to Northern Ireland.
"English was born in England, but his mother and father are both from Derry. He has a chip on his shoulder over his identity and his father would have got caught up in the Troubles," explains Connors.
An Q&A with Connors and director Smallhorn follows every performance; Connors has been overwhelmed by audiences' response.
"It's been a very communal experience that has been magical and healing for both them and me," he says. "People who have never seen theatre before go away talking about suicide, depression, homelessness, the generational impact of trauma and sexual abuse from the Catholic Church, and different tragedies that have happened in Ireland including the Troubles. It resonates with people and opens dialogue."
And have any political decision makers seen Ireland's Call? "I couldn't give a b******s what politicians think of this. They are destroying the country – north and south. We've got it to a lot of working-class and Traveller audiences and that was the aim."
Connors also gained critical acclaim for the film Cardboard Gangsters which centres on rival drug dealers on a tough Dublin housing estate. The film, despite being turned down for funding within Ireland, went on to be shown worldwide via Netflix and was the highest-earning Irish film of 2017.
"We made it on a shoestring budget, shooting a 98-page script, with 40 speaking roles in just 15 days," he says, describing its success as "a nice little 'f*** you'" to those who wouldn't support it "because they said it was too colloquial and wouldn't translate".
While he is planning to focus more on writing and directing in the future, he has filmed three film shorts which are currently in post-production. Innocent Boy is about a young Traveller boy who is deaf; A Bend In The River is set in Tyrone about a character with learning disabilities; and Broken Law, another gangster movie.
He is also set to star as Irish boxer Joe Egan in the biopic The Toughest White Man On The Planet.
"It's an exciting role as Joe grew up about five miles away from me. There are a lot of similarities between us and I even look like him."
As for his next piece of writing, Connors isn't shying away from tough subjects: "It' about the generational effect of clerical abuse and it's told through the eyes of a heroin addict who goes to visit his old Industrial School and he's looking for closure."
:: Ireland's Call runs at Belfast's Lyric Festival from October 23-26, as part of the Belfast International Arts Festival. Tickets from Lyrictheatre.co.uk or Belfastinternationalartsfestival.com
