Caitríona Daly originally wanted to be an actor but fell into playwriting at the age of 10 out of necessity – “because even at that age,” she says, “I knew there weren’t good parts for women”.
She first made waves in student theatre, with Sluts, a biting, fast-talking comedy about the labels women throw at each other and the double standards that let men off the hook. Its combination of righteous anger, whip-smart intellect, unexpected tenderness and lacerating humour has become Daly’s trademark.
The 37-year-old Dubliner has written for stage and screen, including a stint on the long-running BBC daytime drama Doctors, for which she won a Writers Guild of Ireland Zebbie Award. Soap, she says, taught her a huge amount about story and structure, and its role as a tool for public empathy and education deserves more respect.
“It’s the most accessible art form we have,” she says. “Its reach is huge. I remember the storyline about Todd being gay from Coronation Street in the early 2000s – that was huge. I don’t think I ever really knew what being gay was before that. Similarly, with the teenage pregnancy, it can take a topic that is divisive in society and help society to understand it a little bit better.”
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What unites all of Daly’s work, whether on a BBC soundstage or in a black-box theatre, is her commitment to moral ambiguity, emotional nuance and sharp absurdity of modern life. In her breakout play, Duck Duck Goose, which ran at Dublin Theatre Festival in 2021, Daly tackled the social impact of sexual violence from a rarely seen angle: that of the bystander.
Loosely inspired by the nine-week Belfast rape trial of 2018, it features a protagonist, Chris, who is neither accused nor accuser but a friend of the accused, slowly unravelling under the weight of what he knew, what he didn’t and what he refused to see.
“I felt very strongly that if every story we see around rape culture is from a survivor’s perspective, we begin to think it’s the survivor’s problem. And it’s not,” Daly says. “We have to be having the more difficult conversations.”
The play became an international success, with acclaimed productions in Bulgaria, Australia and New Zealand. But at home the reception was more complicated. “We were very well reviewed, which was great,” she says. “But I found some of the reactions quite held back.”
Part of the unease, she suspects, came from its proximity to the real-life case – the four defendants were acquitted – and the discomfort of unspoken social truths.
“It brings in the question of doubt and the question of redemption, or whether you want to believe in it,” she says. “I left the play ambiguous, because I wanted there to be space for conversation. If we’re to take men on the journey with us, we need to have room for their voices in it too.”
Daly’s latest play, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4, strikes a different tone – chaotic, comedic, full of noise – but the questions at its heart are no less urgent.
Set at a bland corporate firm, it centres on three employees spending the company’s social-responsibility budget. Their lunch hour becomes a warped gameshow of points, prizes, dress-up and one-upmanship. Water pistols are drawn, spinning wheels spun. Wrestling matches unfold on a boardroom table. The play quickly unfurls from office dramedy into a satire about power, survival and the rituals we invent to endure capitalism’s grind.
The absurdity is deliberate, but so is the recognition. Daly first seeded the play in 2010, during the economic crash. “I was working in an office that was pretty much abandoned,” she says. “It was on St Stephen’s Green. This entire block of offices being used by the company I worked for. Such a desolate place. And I had this idea where a load of workers re-enact The Late Late Toy Show.
“It was about millennials and how we all grew up being told we could have anything, and we could do anything we wanted, because the world was such a rich, plush place in Ireland in the 2000s. And then the crash happened, and all those dreams of Barbie cars just went out the window.”
Daly has always been drawn to that collision between expectation and reality, between the self and the system. Lunch Punch extends that, exploring coping mechanisms, language games and power plays that flourish when actual power is scarce. “The play’s really trying to explore the things we do to feel like we might have some power over something,” she says, “even though most of us don’t have much power over the structures in place.”
The setting is Gresham Professional Services. It’s entirely fictional but also a recognisable kind of nowhere, with rigid structure and absurd stakes. The rules, Daly says, are familiar to anyone who has temped or worked in an office.
“It takes you a week to learn the rules of whatever office you’re in, and they’re not the written ones. Like, you can’t do this, or say that. Some of the things I had to do in offices, I was, like, what the f**k is this?”
A receptionist named Jess becomes the audience’s entry point. She’s a smart, curious outsider with a PhD in anthropology and an interest in the individualistic construction of western identity, who is both underestimated by and quietly threatening to her colleagues.
Daly, who has temped in countless offices over 15 years, brings a lived-in authority to Jess’s role as observer.
“I love reception work. I’ve done it in so many places: doctors’ offices, cement companies, law offices. The receptionist is always a silent observer, rarely noticed. I used to love going into new worlds and figuring out how people work together. The pettiness is incredible. Like, in one office, at least once a month a woman would come out and tell me there was poo in one of the toilets.”
If Duck Duck Goose dealt in silence – what isn’t said, what isn’t acknowledged – Lunch Punch is awash with language: jargon, acronyms, appropriated anthropology, and pop culture. Daly took inspiration from the choreographed fights of professional wrestling and the conflict-heavy theatrics of reality TV.
“I worked with people who thought they were in a video game or in The Real Housewives ..., by how they spoke. You can feel someone doing a dramatic pause. Nobody knows how to do office culture naturally – it’s performative.
“There’s a line in the play where Jess asks about a no-uniform day, and they say, ‘We don’t have a uniform.’ But of course they do. Office culture is performance: costumes and scripts.”
The scripts extend beyond offices to modern life. “The play’s littered with references: The Real Housewives ..., Come Dine With Me, Father Ted, Arrested Development. They’re not obvious. They’re diluted, so you don’t really know where they came from. But that’s where we’re at. TikTok is this stream of references. We’re living in a Jenga tower of weird meta existence.”
Despite its satire, Lunch Punch resists cynicism. “I didn’t want it to be cynical,” Daly says. “The world is difficult enough. If you wanted to die by cynicism right now, you could. I want this to be semi-uplifting, while being truthful about the world we’re living in.”
The play shares thematic echoes with The Good Place, Mike Schur’s TV series, which explored ethical complexity in a broken world. Daly welcomes the comparison.
“You’ve nailed it,” she says. “What I wanted the end to feel like was the end of the first season of The Good Place. It’s an empowering ending. They won’t be shut down, you know?”
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That instinct for resistance, both political and emotional, pulses through Daly’s work. She cites Ursula K Le Guin’s idea of the artist’s treason: that we’ve been taught that only pain can be intelligent, that joy is naive.
“I see joy and playfulness as everyday resistance. That’s what I was trying to get across with Lunch Punch – just finding pockets full of joy. We’re taught that happiness is stupid, and artists often deny us the banality of evil and the boredom of pain.”
Resistance has limits, of course, especially in Dublin. Daly speaks frankly about the precarity of making art in Ireland: the economic hostility; the shrinking opportunities; the cultural ambivalence. The play touches on this and on the often-forgotten struggles of those outside the capital.
“I’m very seriously concerned about our country,” she says. “Everything is entirely Dublin-focused. We’ve left most of the Midlands without an industry. With the closure of Bord na Móna’s ESB plants, a lot of young people had no choice but to leave. I used to mention that to people in Dublin, and they’d say, ‘Oh, did they? What’s that?’ We can be in a bubble – myself included.”
What keeps her hopeful? Daly doesn’t hesitate. “We’re very resilient. I’m hopeful for some kind of creative revolution. Bureaucracy is killing theatre. I’m looking for punks. I’m looking for some punk stuff to happen soon, because it’s important.”
She smiles, the conviction steady beneath the humour. “The win is getting to do what you love,” she says. “That’s it. That’s the whole thing.” In a world built on distraction, exhaustion, productivity and profit, choosing to keep making art and telling stories might just be radical.
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, in Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
