I graduated with an MA in Drama & Theatre Studies (NUIG) & was co-founder & co-artistic director of Mephisto Theatre Co. 2006-2014. Mephisto created theatre either written by women, about women or with good roles for female actors. We produced – and I performed in – over 26 shows including new writing (Grenades by Tara McKevitt), canonical Irish plays (Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan, The Honey Spike by Bryan MacMahon) and theatrical adaptations of poetry (The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy). I continue to perform (most recently playing Maggie in Blue Teapot’s Dancing at Lughnasa 2019).
Since 2014 I have been writing & devising my own work in an experimental theatre context. I collaborate with other artists to make theatre that explores the possibilities of our human/creative potential by using true stories, existing texts, found documents & audio recordings. In my life and in my work, I am obsessed with people who are not reaching their full creative potential. The art I make expands our perception of those limits. I don’t have a distinctive performance style or aesthetic; I want to create work in many different ways, large and small scale, indoors and outdoors and with different collaborators informing the style and the process.
In 2017 I wrote and performed my critically-acclaimed first play What Good is Looking Well When You’re Rotten on the Inside? (Arts Council Theatre Project Award). The show is based on cassette tapes recorded by my grandfather one month before he died. It examines the fractured and fragile personas we present to the world, who we might be behind them and what we could be instead. During rehearsals I collaborated with four directors Catherine Ireton, Jonathan Gunning, Caroline Lynch and Andy Smith, as an experiment to draw form and function together. Working with directors of different styles on the same piece enhanced the audience’s experience of the multi-faceted character of my grandfather. What Good is Looking Well When You’re Rotten on the Inside? premiered at Galway Theatre Festival (2017) and Dublin Fringe, enjoyed a successful 15-venue nationwide tour supported by the Arts Council (2018) & received the Bealtaine Touring Award (2019) where it was chosen to be the Arts and Disability Ireland-focussed accessible show that year. I have ambitions to tour this show again in Ireland, UK and USA.
I have completed the development phase (Arts Council 2018) on a new theatre piece How To Be A Poet in collaboration with LGBTQ and Irish Traveller rights activist and writer Oein De Bhairdúin from Tuam. It draws on Oein’s life story, literature and documents including the writings of Bryan MacMahon and Charlie Haughey’s 1963 Commission on Itinerancy. It will be staged outdoors in a rural setting.
3 years ago I began the early stages of researching other shows I want to make before I die: a mini-theatre piece about grumpy old men and how they were once hopeful young boys; a piece based on the impermanence of performance based on the letters between famous actresses and their famous writer lovers; a theatre show for dogs and their owners; a comedy show for 9-11 yr-olds about misery; a piece about the history of the Irish in London; a show about my grandmother and the women in my family – a companion-piece to the show about my grandfather; a documentary film about emigration and injustice based on Catholic anti-war prisoners in the USA.
There is one theme that is unanimous in all my work: true stories that burst open our perception of human potential.
Apart from theatre, I work in other disciplines on the same theme: potential. I am co-writing a comedy script for TV about a returned emigrant (The State Of Her), a documentary web-series Mad, Bad and Dangerous – a celebration of ‘difficult’ women, I am part of An Criú, a collective of artists that creates an annual visual art exhibition on Inis Oírr. I have worked on the West Cork Fit Up Theatre Festival for many years and in 2021 I joined with Three Rings (Tuam) to set up the North East Galway Fit-Up Festival.
I have worked extensively in theatre production in Ireland. I have worked with Branar, THEATREclub, Moonfsh, Galway Arts Festival, Landmark, Carlow Arts Festival, Fit-Up Theatre Festival, Macnas & Asylum supporting lead creatives and being a key person in the creative & production process. Until recently I was the production manager for Macnas helping to create largescale outdoor spectacle and street performance for up to 80,000 people on the streets. I was production manager of The Big Chapel X in Callan, Co Kilkenny (Asylum 2019) a promenade theatre piece with 200 performers and 100 audience with participants from a small town, which was nominated for 3 Irish Times Theatre Awards. The nature of my work as a freelance technician and production manager has led me to work with a great number of artists, companies and communities. It has exposed me to a wide variety of theatre-making styles and models of production and touring. I do not, and never did see, my production work as a ‘way in’ to being an artist, more that the two kinds of work have a parallel influence on me, use different sides of my brain and complement each other. I am a better artist because I am a production manager; I am a better production manager because I am an artist.
I am involved in a lot of advocacy work around sustainability for independent theatre artists. I am co-chairperson of Theatre57 in Galway, on the committee for the Rural Artists Network and part of the Theatre Forum Independent Artists Working Group.
My ambition is to continue making work through research and collaboration, to tour to audiences nationally and internationally. I am interested in making work that has a documentary aspect to it; work that is socially engaged and created through documentary-style research resulting, finally, in a theatrical expression. I am motivated by the idea that the transformative experience that can happen when audience, performers and technicians share a space during live theatre is enough to change each other, our communities and our world in profound, tiny ways.
Artistic statement
I graduated with an MA in Drama & Theatre Studies (NUIG) & was co-founder & co-artistic director of Mephisto Theatre Co. 2006-2014. Mephisto created theatre either written by women, about women or with good roles for female actors. We produced – and I performed in – over 26 shows including new writing (Grenades by Tara McKevitt), canonical Irish plays (Eclipsed by Patricia Burke Brogan, The Honey Spike by Bryan MacMahon) and theatrical adaptations of poetry (The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy). I continue to perform (most recently playing Maggie in Blue Teapot’s Dancing at Lughnasa 2019).
Since 2014 I have been writing & devising my own work in an experimental theatre context. I collaborate with other artists to make theatre that explores the possibilities of our human/creative potential by using true stories, existing texts, found documents & audio recordings. In my life and in my work, I am obsessed with people who are not reaching their full creative potential. The art I make expands our perception of those limits. I don’t have a distinctive performance style or aesthetic; I want to create work in many different ways, large and small scale, indoors and outdoors and with different collaborators informing the style and the process.
In 2017 I wrote and performed my critically-acclaimed first play What Good is Looking Well When You’re Rotten on the Inside? (Arts Council Theatre Project Award). The show is based on cassette tapes recorded by my grandfather one month before he died. It examines the fractured and fragile personas we present to the world, who we might be behind them and what we could be instead. During rehearsals I collaborated with four directors Catherine Ireton, Jonathan Gunning, Caroline Lynch and Andy Smith, as an experiment to draw form and function together. Working with directors of different styles on the same piece enhanced the audience’s experience of the multi-faceted character of my grandfather. What Good is Looking Well When You’re Rotten on the Inside? premiered at Galway Theatre Festival (2017) and Dublin Fringe, enjoyed a successful 15-venue nationwide tour supported by the Arts Council (2018) & received the Bealtaine Touring Award (2019) where it was chosen to be the Arts and Disability Ireland-focussed accessible show that year. I have ambitions to tour this show again in Ireland, UK and USA.
I have completed the development phase (Arts Council 2018) on a new theatre piece How To Be A Poet in collaboration with LGBTQ and Irish Traveller rights activist and writer Oein De Bhairdúin from Tuam. It draws on Oein’s life story, literature and documents including the writings of Bryan MacMahon and Charlie Haughey’s 1963 Commission on Itinerancy. It will be staged outdoors in a rural setting.
3 years ago I began the early stages of researching other shows I want to make before I die: a mini-theatre piece about grumpy old men and how they were once hopeful young boys; a piece based on the impermanence of performance based on the letters between famous actresses and their famous writer lovers; a theatre show for dogs and their owners; a comedy show for 9-11 yr-olds about misery; a piece about the history of the Irish in London; a show about my grandmother and the women in my family – a companion-piece to the show about my grandfather; a documentary film about emigration and injustice based on Catholic anti-war prisoners in the USA.
There is one theme that is unanimous in all my work: true stories that burst open our perception of human potential.
Apart from theatre, I work in other disciplines on the same theme: potential. I am co-writing a comedy script for TV about a returned emigrant (The State Of Her), a documentary web-series Mad, Bad and Dangerous – a celebration of ‘difficult’ women, I am part of An Criú, a collective of artists that creates an annual visual art exhibition on Inis Oírr. I have worked on the West Cork Fit Up Theatre Festival for many years and in 2021 I joined with Three Rings (Tuam) to set up the North East Galway Fit-Up Festival.
I have worked extensively in theatre production in Ireland. I have worked with Branar, THEATREclub, Moonfsh, Galway Arts Festival, Landmark, Carlow Arts Festival, Fit-Up Theatre Festival, Macnas & Asylum supporting lead creatives and being a key person in the creative & production process. Until recently I was the production manager for Macnas helping to create largescale outdoor spectacle and street performance for up to 80,000 people on the streets. I was production manager of The Big Chapel X in Callan, Co Kilkenny (Asylum 2019) a promenade theatre piece with 200 performers and 100 audience with participants from a small town, which was nominated for 3 Irish Times Theatre Awards. The nature of my work as a freelance technician and production manager has led me to work with a great number of artists, companies and communities. It has exposed me to a wide variety of theatre-making styles and models of production and touring. I do not, and never did see, my production work as a ‘way in’ to being an artist, more that the two kinds of work have a parallel influence on me, use different sides of my brain and complement each other. I am a better artist because I am a production manager; I am a better production manager because I am an artist.
I am involved in a lot of advocacy work around sustainability for independent theatre artists. I am co-chairperson of Theatre57 in Galway, on the committee for the Rural Artists Network and part of the Theatre Forum Independent Artists Working Group.
My ambition is to continue making work through research and collaboration, to tour to audiences nationally and internationally. I am interested in making work that has a documentary aspect to it; work that is socially engaged and created through documentary-style research resulting, finally, in a theatrical expression. I am motivated by the idea that the transformative experience that can happen when audience, performers and technicians share a space during live theatre is enough to change each other, our communities and our world in profound, tiny ways.