At this year’s Irish Student Drama Awards (ISDAs), three Trinity productions put on a great show, receiving 21 nominations in total and five wins at the award ceremony on Saturday night.
Three of the four prizes awarded to artists from the ISDA gallery also went to Trinity students, with Sophie Furlong Tighe taking first prize and Gabrielle Fullam and Maureen Penrose as runners-up.
In an email to The University Times, Furlong Tighe said that “it was a real pleasure to be included in the gallery among such incredible work”. They describe their poem as “an ode to the rehearsal process in general, and how stage management allows you to watch that process unfold from a distance” as well as “a look at how important the space we’re given (in this case, studio 191) is to us as makers, especially in a time where we are more deprived of it than ever”.
In an email to The University Times, Fullam said that “it means a lot” to be recognised by Trinity graduate and ISDA judge Choy-Ping Clarke-Ng. “I can never believe anyone wants to listen to me… I then try and remind myself that I’m class, and worth listening to.”
Fullam’s piece was an interactive installation made for Women’s Week with DU Players in 2018. “In hindsight, the short piece served as a jumping off point for a lot of themes my later work has explained more fully”, she explained.
Fullam was also behind one of the shows that represented Trinity at the festival. Do As I Tweet, Not As I Do received nine nominations and won Best Innovative Use of a Digital Medium. The show is “a collage-style virtual play” which follows influencer of colour, Samantha Clarke, “navigating the ethics of her job, the pressures of her relationships, and the mounting absurdity of her life”.
Fullam notes how “the piece was inspired by [her] own frustrations and a really strong urge to work through some of the feelings [she] was having”. “I wanted to make something that was indulgent and about me”, she added. When asked about her favourite aspect of working on the show, Fullam stated that it “was probably working with [her] cast and crew who were all totally class”.
Another of the three plays, Transcend, was nominated in five categories, and won Best Multi-Shot. In an email to The University Times, director Daire Kelly stated that they were “feeling really good about the win”. They added that the show was truly actors Mary-Kate O’Harte, Gale Aitken, Seirce Mhac Conghail, and Seán Loughrey’s win: “they are the heart of this piece and make it everything it is.” They also wanted to thank the crew, the people who contributed to the piece, and DU Players for making it happen.
The inspiration for the show came from Kelly’s experiences as a trans and non-binary person. “Most media about trans experiences [is] usually quite sad because our reality is harsh and many trans people face violence on a day-to-day basis”, they explained.
The piece came together in response to this – a celebration of living outside the gender binary. As Kelly put it, “I wanted to explore the euphoria of not being cis-aligned… this piece is really about trans/[non-binary]/[gender non-conforming] pride”.
How I Learned To Eat Myself: And Other Stories, the third show that represented Trinity, received seven nominations and won three awards: Best Overall Design, Best Devised Piece, and Best Overall Production. In an email, show creator Gelsey Beavers-Damron said that she was “ecstatic” about her awards and that “the show doing as well as it did was a dream come true”.
Created for Lorde Fest, a Players event honouring the experiences of female-identifying people, it acted as “a visual representation and abstraction of [Beavers-Damron’s] personal experiences as a female-presenting person”. She added that the show’s creative process required her to be vulnerable and delve “into some dark places” that she still needs to reckon with and resolve.
Beavers-Damron also drew on two real-life events in her production to demonstrate that while these experiences were personal, there is an element of universality, and to give the audience a better grasp on what it means to be female-identifying in a hostile world. As she put it, “the majority of society is female-identifying, yet they are terrified of existing in this world… The show was made and is dedicated to every womxn there is because being a female in this world is hard and anyone who says it isn’t is lying or blind”.
Correction: 5.30pm, April 20th, 2021
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that DU Players shows won three awards. In fact, they won five awards.
