From Colgan Hall to the Abbey Theatre

Caitríona McLaughlin has a message for anyone in Donegal who wants to pursue a career in the arts.

“Sometimes because of how isolated we are geographically, with little access to theatres or cinemas or art forms that might be particularly inspiring, I would ask people not to give up and find paths to do what they want to do and not be put off by geographical challenges.”

It is a challenge that the artist director of the Abbey Theatre has overcome herself, having made her way to the top of Irish theatre after leaving a career as a scientist and working her way up from beginnings in community theatre.

“One of the things that is really important for me in terms of holding this role is the symbolic element of having come from somewhere that is so far north that when I was growing up was even more challenging to physically leave.”

The Carndonagh woman has overcome growing up in a town without a theatre to rise to the top of theatre in Ireland, having also chosen theatre as a career later in life than many of her successful contemporaries.

She studied biological science at university in Coleraine but had already caught the drama bug after being exposed to amateur theatre and drama as a teenager.

Ireland’s first Bench of Hope to be unveiled at Malin Head

The bench is being erected in honour of the work of Gertie and Johnny Fox who helped found Darkness Into Light

She saw some amateur productions in the Colgan Hall but “was not around drama really”.  

“I loved stories and always read a lot and I was mad about films. I suppose initially what I really wanted to do was act.”

It was while at university that she began to explore her interest in drama by spending a summer volunteering at the Impact 92 festival in Derry which was attended by international theatre groups. 

The following summer she attended the O’Casey summer school in Derry which featured an acting teacher from Yale. “That sowed the seed.”

After university, she was working in the Northern Ireland water service as a scientific officer when she was offered a job as a microbiologist working on infectious diseases in Antrim hospital.

It was then that she felt she had to make a decision about her future.

“I always had this thing about wanting to give theatre a go, so I thought this is the moment where either I take the good job or I give theatre a go.”

After leaving her job she volunteered at Derry’s Playhouse, helping out with the theatre’s work in facilitation, youth theatre, education and conflict resolution. She began working there in training and facilitating. 

“It taught me a lot about working with people, about collaborating, about the power of storytelling and it gave me an opportunity to be around the skills with companies coming in and me watching. It let me apply the skills.”

Around the same time, she began a part-time acting course at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, Ireland’s leading drama school, and she also started a youth theatre in Inishowen.

“We had this amazing bus that did this two-hour journey around Inishowen picking up kids and bringing them to Greencastle community centre. I was studying in Dublin and I was literally three months ahead of them. It was good fun, but there was something about learning how to act, understanding the impact of stories through the facilitation work and working around conflict resolution and bringing people together and then being able to pass this on through the youth theatre. And this all eventually led to me directing.” 

When she finished at the Gaiety, she started a theatre company with two friends doing “very low funded productions”.

The company was asked to produce the musical Rent in The Olympia by British director Phil Wilmott and she was appointed assistant director. Wilmott brought her to London to work on his next production.

“I went over for three months and stayed for 16 years. And over there, I eventually realised I wasn’t an actor anymore - I was a director. So it was a kind of slow burn.”

There she worked as a freelance director and also as education director at Theatre Peckham and studied for a Clore fellowship. 

“That was two years of leadership training and I think that had a big impact on me deciding that I wanted to be an artistic director.”

Caitríona also spent a lot of time working in the US after visiting as part of the Clore fellowship and returned every summer for six years.

She began working on and off in Ireland as a director from 2008, including directing a short opera at the Wexford Opera Festival in 2014.

In 2015 she directed Amy Conroy’s Luck Just Kissed You Hello. “That was my starting point of coming back to Ireland.”

She first directed at the Abbey in 2015 and eventually became a regular collaborator with the theatre and was appointed an associate director. She won Best Director at the 2019 Irish Times Theatre Awards for the Abbey’s production of On Raftery’s Hill by Marina Carr.

She was appointed artistic director of the Abbey in 2021, although her roundabout route into theatre made her feel she would not be appointed to such a role.

“I didn't ever think it would be possible for me, given that I always felt I came into the theatre very late and came in through community and engagement work rather than art, and then it was then acting and then directing. So it was a slow, long road.”

She is speaking during the run of Brian Friel’s Translations which she is directing at the Abbey Theatre before going on tour to Limerick and Galway and finishing in An Griánan Theatre in Letterkenny from August 30 to September 3.

It is the second Friel play she has worked on this year after directing The Enemy Within at An Grianán.

Her approach to such a well-known work has been to “take away the paraphernalia” and focus on the writing.

“I think the language is the most exciting aspect of the play. The politics are really interesting but it comes so much from the writing and the use of language and identity in the play. How we identify ourselves, what language we use to express ourselves, what language does and  says about a person, a community and a nation.”