‘We fetishise hard work and stress’

Fresh from the success of the second series of Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, acclaimed writer Stefanie Preissner is penning her second book this summer. Her trick for coping with it all? A non-negotiable, eight hours sleep, she tells Esther McCarthy

She may be one of our most talented writers, but Stefanie Preissner can vividly remember the sheer effort of getting her earliest plays and projects off the ground, and turning to the people of her native Mallow and Cork.

“It was really tough,” she remembers of the crowdfunding and saving and fundraising that is part and parcel of youth theatre. “I spent so much of my life in youth theatre and also in the fringe festival, like, begging for money. Pillaging my friends for money, asking my family, these gofundme accounts.” But she realised even then the importance of dreaming big, and that’s why she’s become an ambassador for this year’s Coca-Cola Thank You Fund. The fund, which will provide €100,000 in grants to non-profit and community groups that support and inspire young people, was something that she could have benefited from as a young actor and writer, she says.

“That is something that I would have applied for when I was in youth theatre,” she tells me. “When there are opportunities for youth groups and young people to have the support to tell their stories, to have their campaigns or their activities, when people are handing out the money, I wanted to get behind that and say: ‘You know that this exists? And all you have to do is apply’.

“Nowadays, we have so many crises in Ireland. There’s a housing crisis, we have a health crisis, there’s not enough hospital beds. Things like youth activities are sometimes the first thing to go. I’m not judging the Government but the fact is, five or ten grand to a young drama group, or horse-riding group, or football team in Mallow, that’s a massive amount of money. That is a year of activities. I took a group to Antwerp once for a European youth exchange and I think the whole thing cost us about five grand.

“We treat things in a vacuum nowadays where we invest money in mental health, we invest money in obesity, we invest money in housing but they’re all linked. If you’re investing in kids and young adults and their ability to express themselves and enjoy themselves, that has a knock-on effect. And I think if you’re investing in things that make people happy, you’re not going to have to spend so much trying to make them unsad.” Preissner is certainly doing her bit to make us unsad, and the second series of her comedy series Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope has proved to again be a ratings hit for RTÉ. But there’s a bite to the humour, an awareness of how we live and interact now to the drama, that makes it all more resonant. This year, the focus on Aisling and Danielle’s friendship has been intensified by their break-up. It’s a take on the pain of a troubled friendship that we don’t often see onscreen.

“I think we have a lot of templates and a lot of scripts for how do you get a boyfriend back? How do you get back with an ex? But not so much for friendship,” she says.

“Danielle’s ultimatum was: ‘Get your shit together Aisling’. What I wanted to look at was how easy it is in this day and age to make it look like you have your shit together on Instagram, and to believe you’ve got your shit together because you’ve got a gym membership and you’re only eating egg whites or whatever. How the concept of fake news has insidiously woven itself into the fabric of our society on a personal level. How you can delude yourself. And also what it means for the girls to not have each other. It’s very easy when things are going badly and you have a dysfunctional friendship, to blame the friendship. But actually, how much of Danielle’s unhappiness is actually Aisling’s fault?”

As a youngster, Stefanie dreamed of one day being a Garda and didn’t initially consider a career in the arts. It was a job on Enda Walsh’s play staged in Cork, Chatroom, that first properly introduced her to drama.

She started travelling from Mallow to Cork every Saturday to hone this new craft, and went on to take a degree in drama. When the acting work was quiet, she started to write, and Solpadeine is My Boyfriend, the one-woman show she wrote and performed in, heralded her as a major new voice in Irish theatre.

In the past year she has delivered the first draft of her first film project, closerthanthis, an adaptation of a book about two teenage twins, and her second series of Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope. There have been other projects too. “I wrote a pilot, for First Look Media in New York. It’s about a girl who has a circadian rhythm sleep disorder and she lives at night time. So it’s a nocturnal series which I’m really excited about.” Though the character is not based on her, Preissner knows this world. She has spoken in the past about getting up as early as 4.30am to write, though she says that she still loves her sleep.

“I still get up at half four but I’ve stopped telling people I get up at half four and I’ve started telling people I get eight hours’ sleep, because I realised that people were fascinated by this half four thing. We are in a country that fetishises hard work and how stressed you can be, how busy you are. That’s not me — I cannot function on under eight hours. Seven maybe, but not anything less. And I don’t want to give people the illusion that I’m up at half four and going to bed at eleven, burning the candle at both ends. That would send me into a tailspin and I think it’s not healthy for anyone. I’m in bed at half eight.”

Nika McGuigan (Danielle) and Seána Kerslake (Aisling) in ‘Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope’.

She says that rest is essential to her creative output. “Absolutely. The brain fog and the emotional hangovers that don’t happen when I sleep, they stop the creativity. I also don’t beat myself up. I’m up every morning and I’m working but sometimes work doesn’t always look like writing. As long as I’m up and doing something… I can’t write seven days a week. I can dip in and out of the habit of it, if I miss a day or two. It’s the same as the gym, if you don’t go for seven months you’re really going to feel that. But if you miss two days it’s not going to be a big issue. With creativity, I can’t keep writing about what’s happening in the world if I’m not spending time in the world.”

When she’s not working, she loves to hang out with friends and her nana, Eileen Keary, and described herself as “really routinised”.

She does kickboxing to keep fit. “I like kickboxing. I find gyms really boring and I knew that if I wanted to get fit I would have to trick myself into learning a new skill. Walking on machines and pretending to climb mountains on machines, I’d just get so bored.” You get the sense that Stefanie is a woman who understands the benefits of sometimes saying ‘no’, so much so that she’s now planning to write a book about it. Hachette Books Ireland this week announced they would publish her second book, No. It’s a Full Sentence, which the writer will pen over the summer months. It’s her second time teaming with the top publishing house, following the success of last autumn’s Why Can’t Everything Just Stay the Same?

“It’s about how no is the first thing that I ever said. And then I forgot how to say it for 26 years. I learned again a couple of years ago, and no, and saying no to things, has changed my life dramatically. And how I’m still really terrified of it, not that great at it, but as I try to do it I see the benefits. Kind of how I’m at my best when I’m at my most uncompromising.

“And the things that society tells you you have to do, like move out of home, go to university, get married, have a kid, have a driveway with two cars. A chimney with smoke coming out of it, and a cloud and a sun like you’d draw when you were a child. To say no to those things doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you.”

For more about Coca-Cola’s Thank You Fund, visit www. coca-cola.ie/thank-you-fund.