Leanne Devlin

Currently touring with two plays, Slippery When Wet and Two Fingers Up, Irish actress Leanne Devlin tells us about her writing process, performing during the pandemic and taking a play overseas.

How long have you been acting?

I’ve been performing bits and bobs since I was a child - I did a few musicals even though I don’t sing or dance, as when I was a kid they were the only drama things going on in my hometown! I started looking at drama schools when I was doing my leaving cert, so I think that was when I begun taking it seriously. I did a year in college studying Performing Arts and then two years at drama school - I did a year at The Gaiety School Of Acting in Dublin and a year at The Guildford School Of Acting.

Where in Ireland are you from originally?

I’m from Donegal, which is about two hours away from where I’m based now in Belfast. I wasn’t really attached to my hometown growing up so, I was excited by the prospect of moving to different cities - I loved going to Dublin and I loved going to Guildford and being around London. When the pandemic hit I moved back to Donegal, although it was fine as there was no acting going on anywhere - I didn’t feel like being in the countryside I was missing out on anything, and that was when I started writing my play Slippery When Wet. When the industry did start back up again I was a bit far away from everything, I was having to travel to Belfast for auditions.

Have you written many plays?

Slippery When Wet will be my second that’s been staged. I wrote one that was staged just before the pandemic, called One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, which was about three girls who had just finished uni and lived together, dealing with the onset of success and what success is, how to be successful and what it is to each of them. That was in February 2020 and lockdown came in March, so I was really lucky to get that in before Covid hit! It was staged in Derry, just for one weekend. It was my first time doing any kind of production role, and I had to do everything because I had no budget to pay people! I wrote it, I produced it, I directed it and I also acted in it with two other cast members, so that meant I only had two people to pay!

What about this time around - do you have more of a budget?

At the minute, no - we have applied for Arts Council funding and we’re waiting to hear back from them. We did do a few fundraisers, like pub quizzes to raise money and an online crowdfunder which had perks related to the theme of Slippery When Wet, so one of the perks was like “If you donate I’ll send you a video of me cracking an egg on my head”, which is ridiculous as you shouldn’t have to do that to make art, but funding’s really bad, especially in Northern Ireland. I can’t remember the exact stats, but Northern Ireland is the least-funded region in the UK - we get like a tenth of what someone might get in England.

Where and when are you performing Slippery When Wet?

It’s really just grown its own legs and ran - I did not expect it to go this far! We’ve just finished a run at the Barons Court Theatre in London, then we go to the Dublin Fringe Festival from the 9th to the 14th of September, and then I’m away for a while with a different show but we come back to Belfast with Slippery When Wet at the Lyric Theatre from the 7th to the 10th of November.

Is this the first time you’ve toured with a show?

For the last year I’ve been performing a show called Two Fingers Up, and it hasn’t really been a tour because it’s been very split up but we’ve done three runs in Belfast, a month at Edinburgh Fringe and we did it in London as well. That’s actually the show I’m doing in the middle of the Slippery When Wet dates - we’re taking it to Australia! We’re going to the Sydney Fringe and the Melbourne Fringe.

Will that be the first time you’ve performed overseas?

It will! I think it’ll be good craic.

How did you come up with the ideas for your two shows?

I never write about my personal life, but I do like to write about themes, experiences that I have knowledge of. Slippery When Wet started life as a short play - during the pandemic there was a theatre company in Belfast doing a festival called No Touching Theatre, where they produced some shows and live streamed them, but working to Covid restrictions, like the cast had to be two metres apart, etc. So I wrote the short version for that - it was like a five or ten-minute piece. I was working at a supermarket at the time, so I wrote about a character who was an actor working at a supermarket - not me, but inspired by what I know - and it was really well received at the festival. That kind of scared me, like I was worried it was too well received so I couldn’t do anything with it, but two years later I started working on it again. I think that was harder, trying to flesh out a story I already had and knew was good, rather than from the start, so it took me a long time to make sure I was doing the character right, sticking by who she was and what was going on in her life. It went through a lot of drafts!

How do you manage to separate yourself from a character you’re writing who’s similar to you?

I think it’s easy because I’ve always written characters who have things happening to them that haven’t happened to me, so even if they’re a similar person when I read it back I know it isn’t me. I think sometimes they start off more like me, but as the script develops and things happen to them they change through the narrative.

Do you always know right away if you like a script, or do some not work out?

Yeah, my laptop’s full of documents of absolute rubbish! I think at the start it’s never good, because you write for quantity over quality, and then when you go back and redraft and refine it you then go for quality. It used to take me so long to write one page because I was trying to make it perfect, but I’ve read a lot of writing books and they all say that the first draft should be just words on a page, so then you can go back and find what’s good in it.

Have you done any screen work?

I haven’t written anything, but I have done a few short films and when I was younger I did a lot of extra work. Mostly theatre though, by a long shot!

Words: Scott Bates

Follow Leanne on Instagram and Twitter

Find out more about Slippery When Wet here