Former nurse Clare finds true calling in theatre

City Lives – Bernie Ní Fhlatharta talks to actor Clare Barrett about her dramatic homecoming

 Clare Barrett is from a generation that was reared on Galway Arts Festival shows and now she’s performing in the Festival herself this year.

Clare’s early memories include seeing the Spanish group, El Comediants performing at the Spanish Arch, staying up late to watch other street theatre and one year, a fireworks display over the water.

She was star struck and vaguely thought that some day she too would like to be a performer.

She has certainly fulfilled that dream and can be seen on the Bank of Ireland Theatre stage on the NUIG campus during this year’s festival in A Galway Girl, a two-hander, written by Geraldine Aron and first performed in the city almost 30 years ago.

Clare, from Renmore, was reared in a house where theatre and the arts were part of family life.

Her mother, Mary, was one of the forces behind the Renmore Panto, so Clare became very familiar with the Town Hall Theatre as everyone in the family took a hands-on approach to the very successful annual event.

In fact, it was the Barretts’ phone number that used to be on the posters for the Panto, so Clare, like every other family member, would often take bookings over the phone and write them in a little book. In those days it was a case of people booking Panto tickets and paying on the night.

As well as being brought to shows, Clare was encouraged to take up speech and drama, which she did with actor and director Rebecca Bartlett, who was a neighbour in Chestnut Grove. Clare later joined the Galway School of Performing Arts, which is where she really cut her teeth in theatre. And of course, she was a Smurf in the Renmore Panto, like every other local child.

Mary Barrett passed away over 18 months ago but Clare knows her mother would have been proud of her first professional performance in an Arts Festival that they had all attended faithfully over the years.

“I know that wherever she is now, she is smiling” says Clare as the tears well up.

Clare has a bubbly personality, like her mother who had an ability to get things done with ease.

“She brought us to everything and yes, I suppose it spurred me into acting, though I am a trained nurse, which I gave up to take up acting professionally.”

She has no regrets as she never felt about nursing the way she feels about acting.  She remembers her first paying acting job, which was with Dublin based Team Theatre.

But before that, Clare was a general nurse in Portiuncula, specialising in paediatrics, after which she worked as an operating theatre nurse in Tallaght Hospital.

In fact, the day she was made permanent was the day she decided to give it all up to study Speech and Drama in the Conservatory of Music and Drama at DIT, where she spent three years.

While attending college, she returned to Galway in the summers and worked part-time in nursing to support herself so she could take part in a few amateur productions.

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