Áine Ryan is the girl who lives down the lane...

WHILE researching female rural stereotypes in Irish theatre, for her dissertation in theatre studies at London’s Goldsmith College, Áine Ryan decided to write her own character “to add to the canon”. This 22-year-old from Tipperary, speaking on the phone from her travels in Vietnam, devised a character and then a play.

Kitty in the Lane is Ryan’s debut one-woman show: she plays a number of characters. The play, which received plenty praise at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has been described by Broadway Baby review guide as “an intense, poetic study of loneliness, cruelty and rural isolation, a mesmeric continuation of the Irish literary tradition”.

The play, which will have its US premiere at the San Francisco International Arts Festival in May, tells the story of a 20-year-old woman living in an isolated cottage with her elderly father. As well as caring for him, Kitty is managing the farm alone, due to the recent death of her brother.