Pauline O’Driscoll: 'Society underestimates how much women have to put up with their hormones'
Pauline O'Driscoll: “I could see even then that the male actors who were doing this life, they had wives and kids at home. After the show on a Saturday night, they'd be gone home to their real life until the Tuesday." Picture: jedniezgoda.com.
“What Monica is trying to say is live your fucking life,” says actor and writer Pauline O’Driscoll who has always done absolutely that.
The fictional Monica is the focus of O’Driscoll’s self-penned one-woman ‘hor-mental’ comedic show, Jump!?, and the character’s struggles with the roller-coaster of menopause will be a hard relate for many midlifers.
The Bandon native’s play, which has had audiences “wetting themselves laughing” isn’t just about menopause; rather, it runs the gamut of the female hormonal experience.
A blackout before a skydive — the titular ‘jump is “a metaphor for the next phase for life” — causes Monica to enter a “liminal space where her life flashes before her eyes” and has her reliving “getting her period, boarding school, her first bra, her first time having sex, learning how to masturbate, falling in love and getting married and meeting this other person coming into her life”, says O’Driscoll.
“Society totally underestimates how much women have to put up with their hormones all the way through life.”
Her own experience of perimenopause informed Jump!? Feeling she was “going mad” and ascribing it to everything but hormonal fluctuations, O’Driscoll recalls a friend gently asking, ‘Pauline, could you be menopausal?’. “I was like, ‘I’m past that’,” she recalls.
“I now know there's no getting past it, because there are no more hormones coming. It's worse it's going to get, not better.”
Monica is not autobiographical, she’s keen to stress, but rather an amalgam of “me, my imagination and various women and girls I’ve met along the way”.
Her audiences are relating to the realness, with women “nodding and laughing and going, ‘Oh my God!’”, then returning for a second time and “bringing their men that they might learn something”.
The show is the actor’s first solo work as a playwright. It was through the process of co-writing The Seven Ages of Mam, another one-hander, with Mark Evans, that she found her writing voice. People had long been telling her to write “because I'm a great talker and I'm a storyteller”, she says, but it was collaborating with Evans that gave her the confidence to do it, and clarified for her “that maybe that I did have something to say that would be interesting, entertaining, educational, whatever”.
The pandemic’s enforced hiatus provided time for O’Driscoll to explore her idea of writing “a play about hormones”, while an Agility Award from the Arts Council facilitated mentoring, “moral support and advice” from award-winning playwright and actor Elizabeth Moynihan.
A further award provided O’Driscoll with the impetus to condense her ideas into a first draft, which she did “in a weekend”. She’s discovered she needs to “vomit out the first draft”, she says, then hone it over and over until it’s read-through ready.
O’Driscoll may be a newbie playwright, but her writing is informed by decades of performing on the stage and screen. She didn’t set out to be an actor, although as a child she was always “making up plays at home”.
Having graduated from UCC with a business degree in the late 80s, she began her working life as a marketing executive in the UK, but her heart was never really in the corporate world. She’d been successful in the green card lottery, so three years after switching Cork for Wiltshire, she headed to America.
“I didn't know what I was going to do,” she says of the move Stateside.
“My father used to always say to me, ‘Oh, she's off to find herself’. And of course it turned out he was right.” Having learned bartending in Boston, she spent three months exploring the States on Greyhound buses, before settling in Aspen, Colorado, where she triple-jobbed as an au pair, a “tequila slammer girl” at a Mexican restaurant, and a ski-wear model.
She also joined the local theatre company and auditioned for a minor role in its production of West Side Story. Aspen has long been a celebrity enclave, so those cast as leads were no average am-dram players.
“One of them was ex Broadway,” O’Driscoll recalls. “One was an Australian soap star, the second wife of John Denver.”
The calibre of her co-stars prompted O’Driscoll to seek out acting lessons and serendipitously, the theatre company arranged for a coach to come from New York.
“It turned out to be with this extraordinary acting coach called Alice Spivak.”
Brooklyn-born Spivak, who died at the age of 85 in 2020, taught acting for 60 years and appeared alongside luminaries such as Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg, and Philip Seymour Hoffman during her acting career.
During the week-long intensive acting course, which O’Driscoll could only attend sporadically due to her work commitments, the Cork woman’s innate talent caught Spivak’s attention.
“Alice said to me, ‘you need to come to New York’.” Initially reticent, O’Driscoll later called Spivak.
“I said, ‘you said I should come to New York. Did you really mean that?’.” The answer was affirmative so O’Driscoll moved to New York to study acting.
“I knew nobody,” she recalls. “Alice let me stay with her for a few days until I found a place.”
Waitressing to pay the bills, O’Driscoll studied under Spivak at her alma mater, the prestigious HB Studio, and was also tutored by legendary acting coach Uta Hagen, who counted Al Pacino, Sigourney Weaver and Whoopi Goldberg among her alumni.
O’Driscoll used her time Stateside to reinvent herself. “I was Paulina the whole time I was in the States. When I look back at it now, as a grown woman, I see that adding an ‘a’ at the end of my name somehow freed me to be different.”
A back injury forced her back home to Bandon, and while she returned to New York to complete her course, pursuing a career there didn’t seem like an option, so she moved to Bath, then London, where she got an agent and did a memorable season of summer stock in Chichester, a time she remembers as “fabulous”.
She toured the UK doing repertory theatre, living out of a suitcase for months on end, a way of life she found “quite unsettling”. Despite loving acting — “my career is what feeds my soul” — the stark contrast between the sexes jarred.
“I could see even then that the male actors who were doing this life, they had wives and kids at home. After the show on a Saturday night, they'd be gone home to their real life until the Tuesday.
“The women who were doing this life at that time were mostly single and didn't have children. And I was like, I don't know that this lifestyle is compatible for women.”
She had her “midlife crisis” then, she says, and returned to Ireland, wanting “to be around my nieces and nephews” and have more of a “family life”, but a lead in the Beauty Queen of Leenane tempted her back to the UK.
A fated return, as it turned out, as the landlord of her theatre digs became her husband, and they now live in Bandon with their three daughters.
The Smalltown and Young Offenders star has had a long, successful career, but O’Driscoll is only getting going. She has, she says, “unfulfilled potential” and hasn’t even gotten close to what she’s capable of.
“I want to write about the stuff that affects women. And I want to write stuff about women of my age and for women of my age. It's what I know and it's what inspires me and drives me and interests me.” Jumping and living her life, just like Monica.
- ‘Jump!?’, Cork Arts Theatre, April 22 and 23, see corkartstheatre.com; O’Donoghue Theatre, Galway Theatre Festival, May 3 and 4, see galwaytheatrefestival.com.
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