Award-winning playwright brings it all back home

By Elizabeth Garner and Jim Hynes

Award-winning playwright and NUIG alumnus Niamh Ryan is bringing her latest creation to the city’s Nuns’ Island Theatre this week, as part of the Galway Theatre Festival – taking her back to where it all began.

Because while her plays have been performed in New York, Dublin, North Carolina and Connecticut, Galway laid the foundations. The Dubliner studied Drama Theatre Performance for four years at NUIG – she says the course nurtured her creativity and proved a launchpad for opportunities in America.

While in the USA, she penned her first play and performed it in NUIG after returning home. Her lecturer Marianne Ní Chinnéide encouraged the young playwright to put her final year project forward for the Galway Theatre Festival – and the resulting Forgive Us Our Trespasses was brilliantly received.

Girl in a Cell is Niamh’s latest production and features her acting talents as well as her writing skills. It is being staged at the Nuns Island Theatre this Thursday and Friday at 8.30pm and on Saturday at 3pm.

The play focuses on Jenna Walsh, a sparky young dancer on the cusp of pirouetting into her greatest glory yet — until she isn’t. It was inspired by topical events and also contains autobiographical elements.

“Covid 19 brought a lot of changes, a lot of upheaval to people’s lives and a lot of our freedoms were taken away,” says Niamh.

“The arts industry was sandbagged and I became very interested in the feeling of being on the cusp of something and it being taken away by circumstances out of our control.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.

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