DYLAN’S JOURNEY
Jenny Fennessy from Ballysaggart and Dylan Kennedy from Glenville returned to live in Jenny’s grandmother’s cottage in Ballysaggart a number of years ago having worked as actors in some of London’s most prestigious theatres.
Their journeys to the big stage followed different paths but it was when those paths crossed that both of their lives took a turn for the better.
Dylan Kennedy grew up in Glenville and was sent to Speech and Drama classes alongside his other siblings from a young age and he took part in pantomimes with the Monfort College of Performing Arts in Cork.
“They were amazing because there was about 30 or 40 in the cast and we were split in two and as soon as we got our Christmas holidays, we would be rehearsing every single day from 9am to 9pm. There was a real gang of us and we were all really close friends,” he recalled with a smile.
While attending the Christian Brothers Secondary School in Cork City he joined the Cork Arts Studio. He also started dancing classes there which would be a significant advantage to him in the years ahead. He recalls getting his first major role as Joseph in ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ which was to ran for four shows at the Everyman Palace in Cork.
“I was the understudy to a guy called Declan Wolfe and he was playing Joseph and he got really sick and couldn’t do it. The director came up to me at the rehearsal and he said: ‘Look Dylan, I know you’re the understudy but we want to get someone else in to play the part’. But there wasn’t anyone there for that rehearsal so I had to sing all the parts and I was so angry that I sang the best I had ever sang and afterwards he said: ‘well, if you can do that in the performances then you can play the part.’”
After his Leaving Cert he decided to attend a drama course in Coláiste Stiofáin Naofa and auditioned for various drama schools in England, securing a place in East 15 Acting School in Essex.
He studied there for three years and was lucky enough to get auditions for acting jobs about three times a week when he graduated, which is almost unheard of in the industry.
“I was definitely not the best in our year but because I looked so young I was in a really small casting bracket and so I was never short for auditions. I managed to get back to back jobs from the day I graduated,” explained Dylan.
Only 6 months after he had graduated from East 15, he got a job in Ireland to act in a touring play called ‘The Bus’. It was there he met Jenny.
JENNY’S JOURNEY
Jenny took a different route into the acting world and many of the stepping stones that would lead her there seemed to appear by serendipity.
It wasn’t until Jenny was in her Leaving Cert year at Presentation Secondary School in Lismore that she started to think about her career.
“I don’t think I had a master plan and I don’t really know if I thought that far into the future either. I thought: ‘well I love drama and if I go to UCC I can study drama and English and geography and I’ll see how I go from there’”, explained Jenny.
In 2005, while studying at UCC she got a phonecall from Tallow man Jack Aherne to audition for a role in Brideview Drama’s production for the National Amateur Drama Confined Competition. Jenny was then cast as Bridget in ‘Moonshine’, a play written by Jim Nolan. Before Brideview took the show on the road, Jim Nolan came to one of their rehearsals and was very impressed by Jenny’s work.
“That was my first time feeling that I was in a proper play. I remember doing ‘Moonshine’ and thinking I love this, I am really happy doing this,” Jenny told The Avondhu.
In 2006 she took on a role with the Palace Players in ‘Son of Man’ and then, following her graduation from UCC, she decided to do a Higher Diploma in teaching. With the H.Dip under her belt she applied for teaching jobs but then one day, while she was out picking stones in a field at home with her family, she got a very important phonecall from Jim Nolan.
Jim offered Jenny a role in his upcoming production of his own play ‘The Salvage Shop’ which he was directing for the stage in Garter Lane in Waterford. This would be Jenny’s first ever professional acting job.
“If I hadn’t done ‘Moonshine’ with Brideview, if Jim hadn’t come and workshopped it and if he hadn’t rang me to offer me the part, I doubt I’d be acting now,” said Jenny.
She really enjoyed her time working on ‘The Salvage Shop’ with actors like Jon Kenny, Annemarie Horan, the late Donal Farmer and many more who gave her some great advice about the industry.
“They said to me, you’re going to need an agent and then Anna Manahan came to see the show and she called her agent and said I think you should take this girl on and they said okay. It was real luck and having great people helping me out along the way.”
While waiting for her next acting job, Jenny did some substitute teaching in Blackwater Community School in Lismore and then she got a call from her agent about an audition for a show called ‘The Bus’.
THE BUS
In 2008, Jenny and Dylan were two of seven cast members in the professional production of ‘The Bus’ - a play for children ages 6-12 years.
The cast were all living in shared accommodation in Kilkenny for the duration of the rehearsals and Jenny and Dylan decided to share spins up and down.
“We’d meet in Ballyporeen or Mitchelstown and we’d get an ice-cream and off we’d go on our journey and we’d just have great chats in the car,” Jenny laughed.
They toured around Ireland with the show for four months and Jenny and Dylan went on adventures together during their time off from the show each day.
When the production came to an end, Dylan went back to the UK but on leaving, he gave Jenny a ticket to London.
“I went back teaching and then I went to visit him in London and we did the long distance thing for two and half years. We always say that it was Vodafone and Ryanair that kept our relationship going,” explained Jenny.
WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY
Jenny continued auditioning during that time but wasn’t getting much work so Dylan suggested that she apply to drama schools in England.
So Jenny applied to the best known drama schools in London and was offered a scholarship in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
“This Guild of Fishmongers paid for my fees for 3 years and what I had to do in exchange was to have dinner with them twice a year and it was in one of the biggest houses in London. Every course of the meal was fish and I hate fish but I said well if they can pay for my fees I can certainly eat the fish,” the Ballysaggart woman recalls.
“The Earl of Antrim was on one side of me and he said he grew asparagus and my father grew turnips so we had a really good chat about the growing methods of asparagus and turnips,” laughed Jenny.
During this time Dylan was working in various theatres across the UK and has had some very prestigious jobs over the years including the role of Hansel in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ at the National Theatre, a role in ‘Philadelphia Here I Come’ at the Donmar and a role in the famous Barbican where Benedict Cumberbatch once played Hamlet.
A few years later the couple then moved to a little cottage in Stratford Upon Avon where Jenny had landed a job with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). It was during this year that the couple got engaged to be married.
When the RSC job in Stratford finished, the couple moved back to London and although they loved the excitement of London and had made fantastic memories during their time there, they decided they wanted to return to Ireland.
THE BIG MOVE HOME
The couple made the move back to Ballysaggart before their wedding in 2017 and Dylan began studying physiotherapy at the University of Limerick while Jenny returned to teaching at Blackwater Community School.
When they returned home they continued to apply for acting jobs around the country but found it difficult to get work so they decided they would create their own work by teaming up with some local actors, setting up a theatre company and bring their production of ‘Lovesong’ on tour around Ireland to great success.
The couple have plans to work on more shows like ‘Lovesong’ in the near future and they hope that they can continue their acting careers in tandem with their current lifestyle in rural West Waterford.