This Much I Know: Gina Moxley

I’m alarmingly straight, a bit of a say what you think person.

We are demons in Ireland for not saying what we think: whatever you say, say nothing. I have no time for that.

I’m so tidy I’m almost anal. I can’t bear mess, it drives me nuts. I’m always measuring and straightening things. I think it’s because as a freelancer you are always partly living in your head – if your surroundings aren’t organised, it’s an added distraction.

I’m learning ballet for The Seagull and Other Birds which I can tell you is some challenge. It’s a bit late in the day to be doing it at 57. As a child, I was serving pints to alcoholics when other little girls were going off to ballet class. My family had a country pub.

I was bold. Feral. I was the eldest of four.

I drew manically when I was kid and knew I wanted to be a painter. I worked in the pub and paid my way through four years of fine art and painting at The Crawford School of Art.

I had done a little acting in school but a career in theatre just wasn’t a possibility. I didn’t know how you’d go about it, it didn’t seem like something that could happen in Cork back then. There was very little happening in theatre - apart from musical theatre like The Montforts, which I’d no interest in as I can’t sing a note.

I moved to Dublin and saw an ad in the paper for Team Theatre. They were looking for actors and a designer, so I called in to ask about the design job as I thought I could wing it. I was told there were open auditions and decided to give them a go as well.

I got the job – the actor’s job. It was such a joy to be in a room working with other people. Being a visual artist is very solitary. It was only when I heard hundreds of kids waiting for us to go on before our first show in Ballyfermot that it suddenly struck me what I’d let myself in for.

I started writing and performing comedy, really bold stuff with Pom Boyd, which led to me get a role with Rough Magic in Digging for Fire, my first job for an adult audience. And they gave me the opportunity to write my first play, Danti-Dan.

I find writing hard. Every time you sit down to write a new play, you know nothing.

Recently I’ve started woking more as a director and as a mentor in script development for other people which means less writing. It’s a relief.

In this business, you have to diversify. A couple of years ago I started developing my own work and looking for funding. Then, I took a sabbatical from being said no to. By a lucky coincidence around that time I got talking to Sonya Kelly which led to me directing her play The Wheelchair on My Face – although directing was a difficult thing to break into at that stage of my career.

My biggest challenge has been attempting to live a creative life in a society that claims to have respect for creativity and art but where in fact people only want the end product. There isn’t a real appreciation of the work and dedication that goes into making a piece of art. I get paid the same as a kid that is straight out of college. That is the challenge – a lot of women over 30 fall out of theatre or the arts as it is not a sustainable life.

I like gardening. I sometimes look longingly at those people who drive around cutting the grass in places like IMMA and think, now that is a cool job. But I’d be hopeless at something like that.

I’m not spiritual. I certainly don’t believe in an afterlife.

If I could be anyone for a day I’d be Marcel Duchamp. He was an incredible artist. His life almost became art. He was also a great chess player. He revolutionised how we look at art and gave it a kick in the arse and brought in a modern, fractured way of looking at the world, like a punk. My thesis in college was on Dada and punk rock.

My biggest fault is procrastination.

I used to do a lot of swimming – even though I smoke like a trooper – until I crocked my neck.

Given the choice, I’d be a first historian over a second rate poet any day. What’s the point in being a second rate poet?

Gina Moxley appears in the Pan Pan Theatre/ Americanitis production The Seagull and Other Birds at Project Arts Centre from 25 Sept – 5 Oct as part of Dublin Theatre Festival dublintheatrefestival.com