One has to admire Gina Costigan’s get-up-and-do-it-yourself attitude. If only because too many actors tend to hang around and wait for their agents to phone to tell them if they have a part in a play, television show, or movie, right?
She, on the other hand, while taking part in a RADA course in London last year, consulted Google at one point to check out upcoming productions in Ireland. She came across the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival and sent them a play she was studying. Though it was rejected, they liked her proposal and asked her to “take on and act in” the world premiere of Carolyn Gage’s The Countess And The Lesbians!
Not only that. This play, which intriguingly focuses on the tensions that erupt between three actors who are rehearsing a play for the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival about Countess Marckievicz is also a production Gina has worked “at nearly every level” in order to ensure it is staged, which “very much broadened” her experience as an actor. In fact, it’s a baptism of fire for Costigan in the sense that this is her first major role in theatre, though she has appeared in movies such as Veronica Guerin, Becoming Jane, and TV shows like Fair City.
“But I sometimes regret my breakthrough in Veronica Guerin was such a high profile part, playing Gilligan’s girlfriend, because I was only 17 and my acting was horrendous, I hadn’t a fucking clue!” she says, laughing. “Then what happens? I go to Queen’s University, study drama, do 11 days work on another major movie, B J, and most of what I do ends up on the cutting room floor. But that’s acting for you!”
Either way, acting is in Gina’s blood. Her mother is actor Maria McDermottroe and her father is John Costigan, managing director of The Gaiety in Dublin.
“And mom had warned me going into this profession to be prepared for disappointment in this sense, because the same thing happened to her on The Boxer” she says. “But having mom and dad in this business is a blessing. Dad even let us do open auditions in the Gaiety for this play!”
All of which was part of the brief Gina inherited when she said she’d “take on” The Countess And The Lesbians. She also had to find a director, who, “is, ironically, a girl who was a year ahead of me in Queen’s and recently finished her Master’s in directing, Sheila O’Reilly.”
So what about the play? What was it about the subject matter of the play that hooked Gina?
“I found the whole idea fascinating. It seems Carolyn got the idea for it when she visited Kilmainham Gaol while she was here for the Festival last year, and she felt she had to write a play to address the fact that Countess Markievicz’s story is not told alongside the story of her more famous compatriots such as Padraig Pearse and Kevin Barry. Nor is the story of her sister Eva and lesbian lover Esther Roper. So this is a play-within-a-play and I become the love interest of the two other women.”
No doubt, there are those who will superficially conclude that if Gina Costigan is taking part in such a play, staged at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival, she herself must be gay. Does that idea bother her?
“Not at all” she says. “Nor does the idea that I kiss a woman in the play. We did many edgy plays in college and this definitely is an edgy play. I’m just looking forward to the challenge of it all.”

The Countess And The Lesbians is playing at The Connelly Theatre in Liberty Hall from May 12-17. For further info: www.gaytheatre.ie