‘Chat on bus made me a scriptwriter’
PLAYWRIGHT Tina Noonan moved to Bray with her three-year-old daughter 10 years ago and is busy preparing for her next play ‘ The Three Kings' which opens in Dublin next month.
‘I love it here,' said Dundrum native Tina, who initially moved to Oldcourt before settling in Hollybrook.
‘It was a great start,' she said, adding that her daughter Isabelle goes to Colaiste Raithin and doesn't even remember living anywhere else.
‘I got a D in Pass Irish!' laughed the writer, on the subject of sending her child to an Irish-speaking school.
However she recalls noticing Nigerian children going to a Gaelscoil, spoke to the principal before her child was to start Junior Infants, and off she went!
‘I went to college late,' said Tina, who was in London at the age of 24 studying Communications and Cultural Studies. The broad education included French, theatre and film, and Tina took to writing around that time. ‘I loved writing the essays,' she said, although a fullyformed idea of what kind of writer she would be had yet to emerge.
Her artist dad, she explained, would have encouraged her if she'd wanted to do just about anything. She added that she has gotten her ‘ ruthless Cromwellian determination' from her mum, a Mayo native and former nurse.
So she tried a few things in her 20s, and more importantly travelled the world.
She was a cook on a charter boat in Australia, and did the same job in Turkey and elsewhere.
‘I travelled Thailand and Indonesia on my own,' she said. A friend was supposed to go but backed out, which turned out to be a good thing.
‘I met loads of people. When you're on your own you have to talk to other people.'
She mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that she was a hostess in Tokyo.
‘It was all very innocent!' the girls would sit and chat to a gentleman in the club, pour their drinks and get paid a very handsome tip for the pleasure.
She raked in about £400 a week and said that while the Japanese men were perfect gentlemen, sometimes the European or American guys got ‘a bit dodgy.'
Japanese mafia members or ‘Yakuza,' with their elaborate tattoos and jewellery, were the best tippers. ‘The first time I saw them I ran off and hid in the loo!'
It was in her letters home that a flair for writing first became apparent to her loved ones, who eagerly awaited the regular instalments.
She later started a night course at St. Thomas' Community College in Bray. ‘I hadn't done my homework one evening. So I wrote down a conversation I had overheard at the bus stop. Another student thought the dialogue was brilliant so that's how I got in to script writing.'
As well as the classes at the local school, Tina became a member of the Abraxas writing group and remains involved with them.
A part-time legal executive, she works about two days per week, devoting the rest of her time to the written word.
Her first work, a radio play called ‘Leonie Summers Night' was shortlisted for a PJ O'Connor Radio Award in 2007.
Last year, she was proud and elated when the curtain went up on her first stage play ‘The Prodger.'
The play was inspired by her great-uncle Johnny ‘The Prodger' who served as a Private in World War One.
He survived but lost his leg, woke up in a morgue and went on to live to his mid 60s.
The play spends an evening with Johnny in his favourite bar in Lismore, Waterford, around 1964.
The Prodger has been long-listed for the Steward Parker Theatre Award and will be preformed in London this year as part of the First World War Centenary commemorations.
‘The more you do, the more you do; the less you do, the less you do,' was a phrase Johnny gave his grand-niece which she now recalls when battling the demon we call procrastination.
‘I'm on a roll now, and have to keep feeding energy in to the machine,' she said on the idea of momentum and working hard to create.
She produces her own plays and finds it very satisfying to stay with the work from the blank page to its conclusion on stage.
Her latest offering ‘The Three Kings' will be on at Theatre Upstairs, Lanigan's Bar, Dublin from February 11 until February 22.
The play is about single dad Ken King, struggling to rein control over his two teenage sons and the effects an absent wife and mother has on all three King men.
The trio are played by Owen O'Gorman, Gary Ó Nuailláin and Edmund Tucker.
The play will be at 1 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday and 7 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Tickets are €10 and available from (087) 7727375 or theatreupstairs@gmail.com.