Any early memories regarding the arts?
The arts has always been a fundamental part of my life and the only career option I’ve seriously considered. When I was growing up, at every family gathering, everyone had a party piece. I always loved to perform and I was always trying to make people laugh. It was just my sister, my mum and myself at home but when the extended family came together, I would be there, front and centre.
My sister was, and is, a writer, and I was the performer. Stand-Up comedy was where I ended up for a while. I’m a vocalist I so I always liked singing as well.
There was no one moment, because it has always, for me, been about the arts.
You had support at home, what about school?
I was always finding my way on to the stage at primary school, but when I went to secondary school I felt quite displaced. I was from the country, I was from a single parent family, which was the kind of thing at that time you would get bullied for. There were a lot of kids from the city and to me they just seemed naturally confident. I felt quite different from them.
In terms of support, I had an English teacher called Mr Duffy and I had mentioned to him that I wanted to audition for the senior school play. He could see I was interested and asked me to stay after the class and read him my audition piece. I got the part and was the youngest student to perform in the senior play.
It was my English and Literature teachers who were really supportive. I was also supported by my music teacher who encouraged me to develop my singing.
Did you go to university or college?
I went on to do Theatre Studies at Ulster University in Coleraine and I had a wonderful three years there. I really immersed myself in that course. I was with a group of people, a class of 20 who were all doing this single subject honours course. Some of them had some background in theatre, some of them had been to college and had studied performing arts, but I hadn’t done that because I hadn’t been offered an opportunity to do that before going to university. Again I felt a little displaced.
I lived in Portstewart and I applied myself and I feel it really set me up well because, after I finished, I was able to leave Northern Ireland to get some professional experience elsewhere.
You had a comedy career at one point?
It was a much smaller scene when I was involved in stand-up compared to the way comedy seems now. This was around 2012 and I knew people like Graeme Watson, Adam Turkington and Sarah Jones because we were all in the organising group of the Sunday Assembly. The Sunday Assembly was, effectively, a UK-wide “Atheist Church”. We set up a version of this in Belfast although it didn’t last too long, petering out after a while, but it was great fun and introduced me to some brilliant people.
After that I did a comedy class with Graeme Watson, and then I went into stand-up and performed my routine for a couple of years. I eventually had to make a decision between stand-up and singing because I was in a band, a single mum, and just couldn’t afford the time. There were a few more paid opportunities for singing, so the decision was pretty much made for me.
There was also quite a high level of pressure being a woman on stage, especially given some of the misogynistic material that was being performed by men at that time. Having said that, most of the people on the scene were really supportive and I still have so many friends doing really well with the comedy today.
But as I said earlier, performing has always been the thing which I enjoyed from as far back as I can remember.
