A fascinating and exciting upcoming play looking at modern romance in the queer community is about to hit Dublin’s Project Arts Centre. Elliott Salmon sat down with its writer and star to get the lowdown on its inspiration.

When I first heard about Boyfriends, a new play by Ultan Pringle in association with LemonSoap productions, I was intrigued. As a self-proclaimed theatre enthusiast myself, I had never come across a play as unique-sounding as this one: “Following a three-month affair between two anonymous men, Boyfriends charts the ups and downs and roundabouts of a modern situationship. As they swing through four million one hundred and ninety one thousand possibilities of what they might mean to one another, through time, sex, Madonna songs, nightclubs, period dramas and calorie counting, Boyfriends asks us to ponder on that age old question: what the fuck is romance anyway?” It’s no wonder I was immediately hooked.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Ultan who not only wrote the play but also stars as one of the leads alongside Emmanuel Okoye.

We immediately jumped into how this play came about and why Ultan wanted to write about bigger bodied people. “I have been spending a long time trying to work out how to write about bodies and make it interesting because I think it's a really hard thing to dramatise,” Ultan shared. “I decided that maybe this play talks about bodies in that they never talk about bodies in it and by them not talking about it, it's constantly on the mind.”