“I haven’t found any other process as emotional as this.” Shaun Dunne is talking about his new play, Rapids, which debuts at the Dublin Theatre Festival this month. An unconventional documentary theatre piece looking at instances of disclosure within the HIV community, Rapids was developed in collaboration with people living with HIV from a wide range of backgrounds.
“When you come and see the work, you go into it knowing that the material is derived from real experiences that we’ve translated into a new form for the theatre,” Dunne says. “What I’ve been doing over the past few years is finding people who have something that they want to see represented on the stage and I’ve been looking at how to formalise and stylise that truth. Nothing is made up, we’re there as conduits and representatives for people who don’t feel comfortable telling these stories themselves a lot of the time.”