Clare Monnelly: ‘Women have had a terrible time in this country for a really long time’

Clare Monnelly has just spent the last four weeks on set in Co Louth, dealing with “lots of blood” and doing “an awful lot of anxiety acting”. The Irish actor (Moone Boy, Doineann) and writer (Charlie’s a Clepto) is playing Shoo, a student palliative care nurse who is affected by a trauma from her past, in director Aislinn Clarke’s horror film Fréwaka. “It’s been super intense,” Monnelly says from the (blood-free) kitchen of her temporary home. “It’s my first lead in a feature – I’ve never been on set every single day of a shoot before.”

The Irish-English language film, made under the Cine4 scheme which brought us the Oscar-nominated Cailín Ciúin, also stars Irish actor Bríd Ní Neachtain and Ukrainian actor Alexandra Bystrzhitskaya. The shoot has been a time of juggling. Monnelly and her actor husband, Aaron Monaghan (The Banshees of Inisherin), share a small daughter, a big dog and a home in Dublin. They’re in demand as actors, but they’re ambitious creators too. Monnelly has co-written two plays – The Hare and The Local – which will feature in the upcoming Cairde Sligo Arts Festival and Kilkenny Arts Festival respectively, and is co-writing a TV series and finishing a one-man play, Superbogger – of which more anon – for her husband.

When we speak, dad and daughter are in Galway while he works with Druid. “We have an extremely sociable, very amenable little 18-month old, who, God bless her, has been hoofed around from set to rehearsal room for basically her whole life,” says Monnelly. “Me and Aaron were up to 90 the whole time about it, and she’s having a great time. She’s living her best life.” That’s not to say balancing it all is easy, but with both parents in the industry, there’s an understanding around what it takes. “I got a local childminder, a lovely, lovely lady to look after [our daughter] for the week and I was so anxious to tell her that I was going to be gone for 13 hours a day, because I just assumed she would think I was a terrible, neglectful mother. But that’s just the nature of the work,” says Monnelly of her stint in Co Louth.

After taking some maternity leave, Monnelly returned to acting with an openness about parenthood. She’s on the board of Raising Films Ireland, a group that aims to make the film industry more inclusive and accessible for parents and carers. When accepting work, she says yes – and explains she has a young child who needs to be factored in too. “Everyone who I’ve said that to without fail has gone: ‘Okay, cool. Well, let’s figure it out’,” she says. It’s this attitude that she and Raising Films Ireland would like to see spread throughout the screen industry. “Just so you don’t feel like saying, ‘I can’t make that work because of childcare issues’ is going to get you blacklisted.”

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Monnelly wrote her first play, Charlie’s a Clepto (2017), because she wanted “a savage part for a really powerful, complex woman and no one was giving me them,” she says drily. Though she felt imposter syndrome at first, she kept writing. Now, in her mid-30s, she’s a multi-hyphenate creator. “When I started out, even if you were lucky enough to get a job, you’d have this incredible chunk of time where you were working, you were being creative – and then the Monday after it finished, you’d just fall off this cliff and be like, what is my life? What am I doing?” she says. “Whereas as soon as I started making stuff, developing stuff, writing, applying for funding, I never had that falloff ever again.”

Acting will always be Monnelly’s “number one love”, but writing has led to new and exciting opportunities. Admittedly, some of her attempts haven’t worked out. For her second play, she decided to explore the topic of body image. After 10 pages, she realised it was “awful”. “To this day, no one has read it,” she says. She turned to writing a two-hander, which became Minefield. “Which is about public shaming – really topical and really issue-based,” she says. “It came from the voices of these two characters and it just exploded out of that.”

Her latest play, The Hare, is co-written with Bob Kelly. “Bob’s writing is really quite lyrical and poetic. And I say c*** a lot… we’re just really different,” laughs Monnelly. Kelly felt that their differing approaches would create an interesting unified voice. They have – The Hare will appeal to fans of Eimear McBride’s novel (and later, play) A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. It’s about a teenage girl who’s an outcast in her local community, with an inner monologue revealing her strange relationship with a hare. Its inspiration was a Catalan short story called The Salamander, about a woman accused of adultery who transforms into a salamander when she’s about to be burned at the stake.

While the Irish-set play – which stars Úna Ní Bhriain – doesn’t refer to specific events, it’s imbued with a sense of how generational trauma in women can manifest itself. “Women have had a terrible time in this country for a really long time,” says Monnelly. “And maybe that was just banging around in both of our brains and it just naturally came out onto the page.”

Meanwhile, The Local (which, like The Hare, is by Once Off Productions but also Asylum Productions), is a site-specific play that celebrates the role of the pub in Irish culture. One of her next projects is the radically different Superbogger, a one-man show about a rural superhero, to be played by her husband. They developed the idea for his Livin Dred theatre company together, and she’s writing it ahead of its premiere in November. Being spouses means there’s a unique sort of pressure on her. “He can ask me about it whenever he wants, and it’s like ‘don’t talk to me about that now, I’m not working on that today!’” jokes Monnelly.

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When she graduated from drama school, she wasn’t sure what her career would look like. With no family members in the industry, she had to figure things out for herself. “But I was sensible enough to know that Hollywood is a gazillion miles away. It’s not that I’m not ambitious. I just really wanted to make a living doing something that I loved,” she says. Her breakout role was as Fidelma in Moone Boy, and she has had an upward trajectory since – especially after taking the creative reins.

What’s it like to look back at how her career has blossomed? “I think if I could show my current CV to the young one who went in for that Moone Boy audition, [she’d] be a bit mind-blown,” says Monnelly. “I think she’d be pretty proud.”

The Hare by Clare Monnelly and Bob Kelly plays at the Factory Performance Space at Cairde Sligo Arts Festival on July 3rd and 4th. The Local by Medb Lambert, Clare Monnelly and Emma O;Grady runs from August 7th-20th at Kilkenny Arts Festival