Irene Kelleher: ‘I’m doing 21 shows over 10 days...it’ll be a marathon’

Actor and playwright Irene Kelleher is bringing two new one-woman plays to the Cork Midsummer Festival, running from Friday until June 22.

But despite writing and starring in both shows, she didn’t always see herself as a writer.

“I didn’t think I was good enough. I didn’t really even know where to start with it,” she says.

Irene studied Drama and Theatre Studies at University College Cork, before going on to the prestigious actor training school, Shakespeare and Company in Massachusetts.

She began working as a professional actor when she returned to Cork in 2010.

While Irene enjoyed being on stage, she struggled with other aspects of her career. “I loved it, but what I didn’t love about it was the industry and the waiting by the phone and the feeling of helplessness in between jobs,” she says.

While on tour with a one-woman play called Mrs Shakespeare at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015, Irene went to as many shows as she could.

“I was so inspired by people who were writing their own work and performing it and touring it. I had written a few short films that did well, but I never, ever considered myself a writer,” she says.

When she returned from Edinburgh, she wrote her first play, Mary and Me, inspired by the true story of Ann Lovett, the 15-year-old girl who died giving birth beside a grotto in 1984.

“That story just always kind of possessed me, and I always thought, if I ever was to write anything, I’d let that be an inspiration,” she says.

The play had a successful run at The Everyman in 2016, and Irene also brought it to Brighton, Edinburgh, London and New York. This gave her the confidence to continue, and ten years on, her work is an even balance of writing and acting.

As a mother, this mix helps her to juggle her creative work with family life.

“I have really grown to love writing, and especially where I am now in my life, having two very small toddlers. The writing suits me more. It’s not that I can pack up and go on tour for two months with a play anymore,” she says.

The idea for one of her new plays, Footnote, came to her while out walking with her daughters, Marie (3), and Kate (2).

“When I bumped into people on the street, they would say, ‘oh, the girls will be on the stage like you’,” she says. “It just made me think, what if they really didn’t want to, and they felt obliged? And I started thinking about that notion in general, of people feeling that they have to follow in their parents’ footsteps, even though it might not be what they want.”

She had wanted to write a play based on her time working in Cork’s famous Liam Ruiséal’s bookshop, which closed in 2018.

“I always thought it would make a great play and a great comedy. But I didn’t really have the central character,” she says. “So I started thinking about this character who works in a bookshop, whose mother is this really world-renowned, famous poet and writer, and she is trying to be a writer herself, but she’s just not any good.”

Footnote tells the story of Noreen Gilhooly, who works in the Quirky Scroll bookshop. She is the daughter of a celebrated poet, wrestling with her own literary ambitions. It will be performed in Triskel Arts Centre, and directed by Cork comedian and presenter Laura O’Mahony, who worked with Irene in Liam Ruiséal’s.

“It was actually Laura got me the job! So she really understands the bookshop world as well. And nobody has finer comedic skills than Laura,” Irene says.

Her second show, Stitch, strikes a darker tone. It’s set in 1989 in a garment alteration shop called Pins and Needles, which is about to close down. The main character is Alice, whose face is covered in scars since she was a child. “It’s a family-run business, but the only people left in the family are Alice and her aunt Katie, and they run the shop.”

The play is set on Samhain night, “where the veil is thin and something is stirring”.

Stitch is directed by Regina Crowley, and will be staged in the venue of the former J. Nolan Stationery Shop on Shandon Street. “It just has that old world feel to it, and when you walk in, it does feel like being transported back in time,” says Irene. Set design is by Jenny White, and costume design is by Valentina Gambardella.

For both shows, Cormac O’Connor is on sound and lights, and Michael Anthony Greene is production manager.

When festival director Lorraine Maye invited Irene to bring both plays to the festival, she jumped at the chance.

“It’s such an important festival for an artist like me, who’s based in Cork, who can’t, because of family life at the moment, travel that easily,” she says.

“It’s the one time of the year that programmers, that reviewers, that people travel to Cork to see theatre. I have been very lucky that they’ve supported me over the years.”

It will be a challenge, but Irene is ready for it.

“I’ll be doing 21 performances over 10 days. So it is going to be a marathon,” she says. “But when is this opportunity going to come again? There was no way that I was going to turn it down.”