'It's bleak, that's why you laugh': Derry Girls' Siobhán McSweeney puts on a happy face

Siobhán McSweeney tells Ed Power how months spent cocooning in London made her fall in love with Samuel Beckett again, the challenges of her new role as a television presenter and how a trip home to Cork at Christmas gave her a much-needed boost

Siobhán McSweeney. Picture: Moya Nolan

On Saturday, January 30, Siobhán McSweeney will stand all alone in front of the world. The Cork actor is to appear in a special, audience-free performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, to be live-streamed from the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. The Derry Girls and Great Pottery Throw Down star is nervous and excited – all the emotions at once, really.

“How in God’s name did I end up doing a play about a woman stuck up to her waist in a mound and forced to go through the same day over and over,” she says of the production, in which she will play Winnie opposite Marty Rea’s taciturn (and largely off-stage) Willie. “I don’t know what popped in my head at all – no external circumstances.” Beckett is the perfect artist to help us negotiate the pandemic, she feels. His work is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of existence, the inner workings of the human mind. All themes with which we are presently wrestling in our day to day lives.