Finding a way to kill the pain

Stefanie Preissner bares her soul in the autobiographical play, Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend, writes Colette Sheridan

BASED on personal experience, Stefanie Preissner’s one woman show, Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend, opens at Cork’s Half Moon Theatre today and runs until Saturday. While it deals with serious issues such as mental health problems and codeine addiction, the play is so humorous in places, some reviewers have referred to it as stand-up comedy.

Preissner describes her writing style as “quite tongue-in-cheek and self aware. It has that comedy that comes from retrospection, looking at how I was. I think that’s the way to engage audiences, to have humour, because I’m dealing with such a stark subject”.

German-born Preissner, who grew up in Cork before moving to Dublin, explains that she suffers from depression and anxiety. She is now coming off medication having been on it for 18 months. As part of a joint initiative by the Cork Midsummer Festival, the Project Arts Centre and the Dublin Theatre Festival, Preissner, along with 14 other artists, went to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co Monaghan last year to develop work with a mentor. However, the play she planned to work on got shelved when her life became messy.

Preissner’s boyfriend left her to emigrate to Australia, and then her grandfather died. “I was in this really strange place. I couldn’t find the energy to write. Then when I came home, my house went on fire and I lost everything I owned.”

The Dublin Fringe Festival gave her a space in which to work. “I sat in this room and the play just kind of came out. I was taking Solpadeine at the time. By the time I started to write the play, I was aware of the effect that Solpadeine was having on me. It had stopped working. As I say in the play, I saw Solpadeine as something that could kill headaches and feeling low. But it turns out that what I had was a chemical imbalance which wasn’t going to be alleviated by codeine.”

Directed by Gina Moxley, the play looks at how relationships, economics and mental health dissolve just like Solpadeine. “It’s about how if you want something not to dissolve, you have to make sure that there are internal bonds holding everything together so that you can be strong.”

The play is very much in tune with the zeitgeist, dealing with emigration, a topic that 25-year-old Preissner is affected by as many of her generation leave Ireland for a better life.

“Ostensibly, it’s about this girl who moves from Mallow to Dublin. She falls in love with a boy. But he slowly finds out that his degree in engineering is just a piece of paper. All of his friends are emigrating and he’s looking at pictures of them on Facebook, lying in the sun in Australia. So he heads off and she is left on her own with this black dog of depression.”

The female character starts to unravel as the economy declines and life becomes difficult. “She has to fight or take flight. The two sides of the coin are portrayed. I play the boyfriend for a section of the play.

“There is talk of the rationale behind people who emigrate. The female character doesn’t want to be somewhere she doesn’t belong.”

A graduate of drama and theatre studies from UCC, Preissner plans to stay in Dublin. Her play has been performed on RTÉ Radio.

“Emigration has happened before. There are people older than me who’ve lived through it and who followed work by Tom Murphy. His play, Conversations on a Homecoming, has a theme similar to mine, but it’s of a different time.”

- Colette Sheridan