Peer To Peer CAO Special: Sarah McDonagh - "I like the variety that the course offers – I wanted to try a bit of everything"

Sarah McDonagh

Contemporary Applied Theatre Studies
Mary Immaculate College, Limerick

I did stage school from a really young age. I started with Spotlight in Limerick, when I was five, and I did that up until I was around 17. I knew I wanted to do something performance based, but wasn’t completely sure. I joined the local Limerick Youth Theatre Club when I was 17. One of the girls was a year above me and she told me about a theatre college course in Limerick. I looked it up and it was right up my alley, so I applied.

That was my top choice on the CAO. The course offers a full year placement in third year, so you do two different placements over the two semesters. I went to Galway for four months and I worked with a theatre company called Branar, they’re a TYA company. They do theatre for young audiences. That was my first hands-on technical experience with shows because I’d only ever been a performer. It was nice to get into the tech side of things, and an introduction to the play side of theatre and working with kids.

Then I went to Cork, which was with Graffiti, a youth theatre. I did workshops with them every week and with the film theatre for a few months. I like the variety that the course offers – I wanted to try a bit of everything. There was script writing, directing, storytelling and more.

We had an end of year play in first year. You’d rehearse two days a week for eight hours and it’d be part of your grade, then it’d be put on in the Bell Table or the Lime Tree. In second year, you wrote the play yourselves as the class. Now, I freelance as an assistant stage manager and a stage manager, and I’m teaching in the stage school that I was in years ago.

The theatre industry, because it’s such a small community in Limerick, you work with the same people a lot and you make really good connections with them. Recently, I got offered a job on a film, the theatre kind of bleeds into the film industry as well.

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