Straight outta Kildare

Rap culture vanity, Ireland’s boom-to-bust economy, grubby sexual politics in a rural nightclub and the unbridled pleasure of hip hop dancing. If you struggle to imagine any connection between these subjects, then you haven’t yet been introduced to the whip-smart, multifarious joys of Aisling Bea. A drama-school trained Kildare lass opens a trick-box of daft accents and elastic facial expressions, before sealing the deal with an energetic fit of popping-and-locking. Pretty fly for a white girl.

Half-an-hour off stage, her mouth still moving at hyper-speed, Bea sits on Gilded Balloon Teviot’s rooftop terrace animatedly theorising about how Ireland’s peculiar obsession with booty, bling and sunbeds in her youth was a manifestation of the Celtic Tiger that roared, and later whimpered. “I do think there’s something in the underdog slowly getting wealthy and going ‘look how much money I fucking have now!’” she muses. “That’s what we did. Ireland went nuts. When I was growing up, I was orange. We all wanted to look like LA people, wear our money on our sleeves, Louis Vuitton bags. People my age are living in negative equity now – they’ve got these giant mortgages. It’s a loose connection, but I think it’s something with that [idea of] hip hop money.”

When she left the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) in 2009, Bea had bleached blonde hair and a fake tan, and fully expected to march into major roles in serious dramas. “I was sure I’d be given all the lead parts as the woman with the dead baby,” she jokes. A steadier, more modest ascent in the acting world followed, with parts in sketch shows and sitcoms such as Cardinal Burns and Dead Boss. But it’s a branch-off into standup comedy which seems to have really caused the penny to drop as to this 29-year-old’s talents (she also writes for TV, radio and online).

Egged on by peers, her family’s rich history in raconteuring weighing heavy on her mind (her grandfather Micheál O’Suilleabháin and grandaunt Siobháin Ní Shúilleabhaiin were both prolific Gaelic writers), Bea’s first flirtation with standup came at a poetry-night fundraiser for a friend’s play and she hasn’t looked back. Driven by a dogged work ethic, her natural capacity to crack up a roomful of people took its course, leading her to win 2012’s So You Think Your Funny?, make a well-received appearance on Russell Howard’s Good News, and eventually head up to Edinburgh for a Fringe debut among this year’s buzziest with C’est La Bea.

But back to hip hop, a subject she genuinely holds very dear, and the invitation to wax lyrical upon which Bea greets with a sudden burst of chair dancing. “I bloody love it!” she beams. A wide-ranging discussion on hip hop, reggae, pop and much else in between ensues – from Major Lazer’s new album to Snoop Dogg’s movie about his conversion to Rastafarianism Reincarnated (“I really loved it until the bit when he glorified being a pimp”), turntablism documentary Scratch, and how Bea would like to put a ring on Macklemore for having the guts to guide a song supporting the legalisation of same-sex marriage into the charts.

“I wanted to put all this in the show but it would alienate half of the audience,” she says. “Like, how you had this thing called toasting, which was shouting over music in Jamaican dancehall. That’s so Irish – shouting over music. That’s all we do. Jamaican and Irish cultures are so similar.”

I try drawing a tenuous parallel between gender inequality and stereotyping in comedy and that in hip hop (Bea’s only the second woman in 25 years to win So You Think You’re Funny?). It prompts an impassioned rant about the unwillingness of certain female superstars to let their “influence over the first world” be used as a force for female empowerment. “Nicki Minaj – why not try to get the camera to point at your face where your words come out, instead of your crotch?” Bea exclaims. “We can still see your crotch, love, don’t worry.

“Rihanna’s the worst. That ‘Blurred Lines’ song: ‘domesticate yah, I’ll rip your ass in two.’ You’re going, ‘where’s it gone that sex is about two people?’ Because that was getting there with hip hop – like Missy Elliot. She’s empowering to women, she did what she wanted to do, not ‘do what you want to me.’ Where have we gone that even women are glorifying [male sexual domination] these days?”

Bea is cautious about how female characters are represented in her standup routines – such as when she imagines a fantasy urban dance movie and the stripper is the guy and not the girl. “When your words are what you do for a living,” Bea states seriously, “I do think you should have some responsibility over them."

“Now, if Rihanna came out with a song that’s ‘don’t touch me ‘til I say yes, don’t fuckin’ hit me unless I ask you, you should bring us out for fucking dinner, young girls you shouldn’t be pressurised into sex, young girls don’t let him do you up the ass it isn’t the norm, porn has taken off it’s going crazy, men don’t gang up on a young girl and rape her, la la la la la’... I’d go ‘yes Rihanna.’”

Could Bea ever imagine herself showing them how it ought to be done? She describes being taught some hip hop dance moves by a friend in preparation for C’est La Bea as “the best hour of my life,” but laughs off the prospect of ever embracing her inner MC. “Straight outta Kildare, comin’ at ya. Noooo!”

With thanks to dancers Lil Matty B from the Heavy Smokers Crew, Mathew Brown from Psycho Stylez Crew, and Nico Major.