Edel Coffey speaks to actress Eimear Keating who will make her Abbey debut in Somewhere Out There You as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival this month …
Anyone who saw Nancy Harris’s RTÉ TV drama The Dry will already know she writes smart, culturally observant and blackly funny scripts. Harris’s background is in theatre and this month, her latest play, Somewhere Out There You, will make its debut at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. Somewhere Out There You tells the story of Casey who has started dating Brett, her dream man. But Casey’s sister Cynthia smells a rat and starts digging into Brett’s background, threatening to burst her sister’s loved-up bubble.
Mullingar actress Eimear Keating has been cast in the role of Casey and will make her Abbey debut in the play. “I’m still a bit speechless,” she says over zoom. “At the same time I’m very grateful for the opportunity and I’m coming in with guns blazing; I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Keating says her perspective has completely shifted since emerging from lockdown. “I think that’s why I got this job, because I have that perspective of enjoying life a little bit more. I graduated in 2016 and it wasn’t until Covid hit that I realised that life is worth enjoying. I think everybody’s mental health was a bit compromised but I suppose I wanted to fight against that and thought to myself, I’m just going to decide to enjoy life, especially when there’s nothing else you can do. Why sit in misery when you can rise above it?”
Her outlook on auditioning now is more optimistic. “I used to get an audition script and I’d read it and I’d go, oh no, they’re not going to choose me and I’d go into the audition and try my best but because you’re self-sabotaging you just don’t get the role. When I got this script it was one of the first auditions I’d done since Covid and I thought, here’s a chance to have a bit of fun.”
Keating grew up in Mullingar. The eldest of two daughters, her mother was a nurse and her father a teacher. “I started acting in the Mullingar Arts Centre and to be honest I got my love of it there. It’s something I just kept going back to. When people ask why did you want to become an actor, it’s changed for me over the years. When I first started, I really liked pretending to be someone else and being a character and now it’s changed into I really like telling stories and creating a world, which includes characters. My parents always said, you should become a teacher and I used to teach drama up until recently but I just can’t see myself doing it. I loved teaching to an extent but you know when you can’t see yourself doing anything else, you just realise it’s a vocation. And that’s what The Lir was, it’s a vocational college.”
She says studying at The Lir changed her fundamentally. “It was a fantastic course. They wanted to extract any bad habits that you have and they build you back up to the actor that you should be. You do come out a lot more confident. I’m not the person I was before I went in.”
She studied the Stanislavski method at The Lir. “I’m not dismissing anyone who is method but we were taught Stanislavski method, which is basically, know the world that you are about to enter into, know what their favourite breakfast or favourite dinner would be, know their ins and outs. We had a movement course in The Lir and beforehand I couldn’t imagine the idea of moving in a space or being in touch with any part of me but we were taught by [the actor and Head of Movement at The Lir] Sue Mythen and by the end of it I was very much into how your posture affects a character.”
Somewhere Out There You is billed as a romantic comedy with a twist so Keating is reluctant to say too much for fear of spoilers. “I’m really afraid of giving anything away. The play starts with Casey introducing Brett, her boyfriend, and they’ve been going out two weeks and her family can’t understand how she could bag such a handsome bloke,” she laughs. “She’s a real hopeless romantic to an extreme factor.”
Keating hopes her future work will include film and television, but for now theatre is her first love. “I just want to be on the stage all the time, there’s nothing like it. You’re just there, in the moment, no one is stopping and starting you. I wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to be in a film or a TV show but being on stage, in the moment going through the whole arc of a story from start to finish by the end of the night is just amazing.”
Somewhere Out There You will debut as part of Dublin Theatre Festival and will run from Wednesday September 27 – Saturday October 28; www.abbeytheatre.ie.
