Anthony's heartfelt play draws on real-life experience 

Anthony's heartfelt play draws on real-life experience 

Anthony Kinahan brings his one-man show, Unguarded, to Ballina Arts Centre.

Louth actor Anthony Kinahan brings his heartfelt but very funny play Unguarded, about the pitfalls of surrogacy, to Ballina Arts Centre this Saturday. Drawing on memories of his own childhood, and his personal experience of fatherhood, he guides us through the rollercoaster experience of not having legal rights to your own child.

Anthony was drawn to the subject by the plight of two friends, a lesbian couple whose children were born through surrogacy in the sense that one of them was the biological mother (it was her egg that was fertilised in vitro) and the other was the birth mother.

In this case, as Anthony’s friends discovered, only one of them is recognised in law as the “true” mother.

This is because, under Irish law, only the birth mother is the mother of the child. An infertile woman who has her child via surrogacy cannot be recognised as the mother. This means in the case of divorce or widowhood she has no legal relationship with her own child. The situation is even more precarious for parents who are neither biologically related nor gestational parents, as will always be the case for one partner in male gay relationship.

It is this anomaly that explains the title of Anthony’s play: Unguarded.

Anthony was raised with four siblings not far from Dundalk, and as a child “was a bit of a clown".

"I liked making people laugh. As the fourth of five children, you have to make yourself heard!” 

He sang in the church choir and joined the amateur musical society in Dundalk at age 11. 

“It was my mother’s idea.” 

He loved it.

In one of those quirks of fate, in 1998, the arts services in Dundalk received cross-border peace funding and decided to put on a youth production of Romeo and Juliet – because what could be more appropriate – in Dundalk Town Hall. Anthony, now 16, auditioned and got the part of Romeo. It changed his life.

As soon as he walked out on stage, he knew he was at home.

“This was what I was born to do. It became a burning desire; acting was something I had to pursue.” 

He went on to take communication studies at Dublin City University. 

“But really what I did was the drama society. I lived and breathed it, it was my full-time job. I made lifelong friends there, and learned skills I might not have learned if I’d gone straight into actor training: production, directing, writing.” 

Anthony met his partner when they were both 17, in 1999. In 2003, they got engaged, but as a gay couple, it was “an expression of commitment but with no end goal". 

"Civil partnership was not even invented then," he says.

Then in 2004, the UK brought in civil partnership, and Anthony and his fiancé went north to get married. 

“We put all our people on a bus to Belfast, had a lovely ceremony, then brought them back down to Dundalk for the reception. We were, of course, aware that as soon as we’d crossed the border, we were no longer in a civil partnership, but we still had great craic.” 

At that point, he says, it was “for us not a very political thing". 

"It was when we were interested in becoming parents, five years later, that it became political.” 

In 2009, Anthony and his civil partner were living in London, where Anthony was doing an MA in acting and his partner was a special needs assistant. 

“After that, it was out into the big bad world as a jobbing actor.” 

He earned his bread and butter as London tour guide, “walking from one royal palace to another, come rain, hail or shine – not a job for the faint-hearted". By now, he and his partner were ready for parenthood and considering adoption.

Yet if they adopted, returning to Ireland would be a problem. Gay parents were allowed to adopt in the UK, but in Ireland, they were unprotected by Irish law, which meant simple things like signing school and medical forms would be a legal minefield.

They didn’t want to live in exile, so they gave up the idea of adoption and moved back home. The crash had just happened, so “half the theatre companies in Ireland were gone”. Anthony got a job as the manager of the National Leprechaun Museum, which was better than being a tour guide, he says, “because at least it was indoors.” And then he laughs, and says: “No, it was fun. There was a lot of performative storytelling involved, and I have a big interest in Irish myths. But then it was time to move on…” 

Next came a five-year stint at the Project Arts Centre as a barman, but picking up a lot of acting parts, stage and screen, finding his way back into the scene.

Meanwhile, he and his partner had joined the nascent fight for marriage equality. It was a hard slog in the early days.

“None of the politicians wanted to back it until they were sure the majority supported it.” 

At the same time, they hadn’t given up their dream of raising a child together, and in 2012 they became the first same-sex foster parents in Louth. 

“Fostering instead of adoption was a hard decision,” says Anthony, “but it came down to the fact that we realised we had a spare room, we were privileged, and we could give someone that wasn’t privileged a better start. We stopped thinking of it as ‘we want to be parents’ but as ‘we can help someone else’.” 

Dean, who is neurodiverse, came to them when he was 12. A year later came the marriage equality referendum. Anthony remembers seeing all the 'No' posters go up. 

“It was a hard place to be,” he remembers, especially when Dean saw one of the posters displayed outside the estate where he lived with his foster parents.

Two men can’t replace a mother’s love, read the poster.

Dean turned to Anthony, puzzled. 

“Why are they saying that?” he asked.

It was a painful moment, but it redoubled Anthony’s determination to campaign for a 'Yes' vote. On the night of the referendum, he was exhausted.

“I remember closing my laptop, totally drained, not knowing the result, just knowing we’d done all we could. We’d addressed the Citizen’s Assembly, we’d been on the Late Late, we’d canvassed, we’d manned stalls...” 

The rest, of course, is history.

Anthony left bar work in 2017 because he was finally getting enough acting work. The screen jobs paid best, but his love was physical theatre, so he joined the theatre company Quintessence, in Dundalk, and then, as Artist in Association in Drogheda Arts Centre, penned his first one-man play, Unguarded.

“It was the story that poured out of me when I sat down to write,” he says. 

He was influenced by a variety of things: his friends, his campaigning work, his experience of fatherhood, his love for musicals, the fact that his son is neurodiverse.

Ballina itself is one of Anthony’s influences.

“When I was a kid, my family came here on holidays from Louth and I had a brilliant time. There was a kid’s club in my play which is based on the one I went to in Downhill Inn as a 12-year-old boy.” 

Now he is back, in Ballina Arts Centre, multi-role-playing the father of 12-year-old boy and the boy himself. Welcome back, Anthony!

* Anthony Kinahan brings his one-man play Unguarded to Ballina Arts Centre on Saturday, February 24th, at 8pm. Tickets: €18/€16.

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