The Monthly interviews playwright, and actor, Patricia Gormley – Part 1 – Becoming a Playwright

What attracted you to writing?

I was always into literature, I loved literature at school, but I didn’t get to go on.

My young sister died of an overdose, when she was only 18.  After a difficult period in my life, I went back to education, did my A Levels, then I got into Queen’s University. I was in the drama group and I did a couple of plays at Queen’s.

After I left Queens, I taught for a little while and due to family circumstances, I was moving out, I got a job as a Co-Ordinator in a Fold. When I moved into the Fold, it was a brand new building, and it felt like a new start. The tenants, and myself, were very excited about where we were.

What happens then?

We would have meetings and I suggested to the tenants that instead of doing bingo, we should write our life stories and that lead us to do a few plays. We also did creative writing classes with Martin Lynch and things like that.

How do you go on from there?

There was a play at the Spectrum Centre which Andy Fee’s group was performing and he invited me to go up and put our play on. It went really well, the audience were cheering and roaring and that felt brilliant.

After the show was over, Andy introduced me to a woman whose job was to allocate grant funding. She asked me if I had ever considered doing a one-woman show, and I thought that was a great idea. She said she would get me some funding and so I ended up getting money to buy a laptop, which I didn’t have, I also bought a little sound system as well.

Do you start writing and performing after that?

I wrote a play, “I’ll tell my Ma” and I performed that in the Fold, which is up in Andersonstown. I invited all the tenants to come along and I gave them all slips of paper and I said that they could write comments about the play. If they thought something didn’t work, or they thought something wasn’t funny, they had to tell me.

I performed the play around all the Community Centres, performing for the pensioner’s clubs and groups like that. One night, in the Andersonstown Social Club, Christina Nelson, she’s an actress, I’d worked with her before, brought Joe Rea along from Joseph Rea Productions. He said he wanted to produce the play but because I have asthma. and get out of breath sometimes, he thought I might not be able to perform for a number of days in a row, so Christina got the part

Where was that play put on?

It was put on in The Mac, I can’t remember if it was The Lyric or The Mac, but I’m pretty sure it was The MAC, and the play sold out. From then on people just kept asking me to do it in other places. I did that play all over the place: for a big union conference, for people in the country, for International Women’s Day.