I was living in Dublin from 2004-2006, it was a wonderful city, a hard move.
During my time I was fortunate enough to play Shakespeare in the Park at St. Green twice with The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night with director Kristian Marken. Doing the Shakespeare comedy plays have been some of my favourite and most enjoyable moments, and I have never lost my voice quite as much as after days of speaking up the open park, in all kinds of Irish weather, doing two performances a day for weeks, trying all kinds of remedies to fix it.
I also was so lucky as to get a part in Emma Donaghue’s I Know My Own Heart, playing the legendary Anne Lister’s love interest Marianne Brown, at the Larkin theatre, a play we had wonderful reviews on, thinking back it fills me with a sense of brave beauty, hardship and a lot of feminine power!
Ireland was stunning, and strange at the same time, it was before the crash, so all was about money and property, I don’t think I ever understood the hunger for investment in the building buzzing boom, it left me puzzled and observant. But we travelled, a lot, and I got to see the vast ever so green and enchanting land, also because everyone got married, I think we were at 10 weddings within a year, huge weekend weddings in the countryside with people and family I did not know – in the end I had to put my foot down and say, ‘no more weddings, it’s too much!’
I loved the bookstores, bought so many classics, I walked the city endlessly, visiting museums, parks, writing and absorbing the Ireland I really only knew before from Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde and Beckett, and of course The Commitments. Now it also became Thin Lizzy, Guiness n’ toasties, and laughs with amazing friends and acquaintances.
I still have an old postcard of O’Connell Street and a postcard with a portrait drawing of Pádraig Pearse hanging on the wall in my kitchen, so Dublin is never far away even though I haven’t been back for so very long; getting reminiscence nostalgic, blissful and broken-hearted when trying to recapture my Dublin days, ahhh…
Photographs from some of the trips around Ireland, ahhh…
