Nicola Spendlove: ‘I think that lives in our bones as Waterford performers’
Nicola Spendlove
By day, Nicola Spendlove is an occupational therapist, but by night, she is an actress, playwright and one of Waterford’s most promising artists.
It has been a fantastic year for the 34-year-old Dublin/Waterford woman.
Her radio play Mea Culpa, which aired in January, is currently nominated for an IMRO award and Nicola herself was chosen to audition at the Abbey Theatre this summer.
When we spoke to Nicola, she said, for her, an audition at the Abbey was proof that there is a place for regular people in Ireland’s most prestigious art spaces.
“To me that is what Waterford is. That was the trail Red Kettle [theatre company in Waterford] blazed. You don’t have to be this classically trained, highfalutin person to belong in these spaces.
“I think that lives in our bones as Waterford performers,” said Nicola.
Nicola, originally from Rathfarnham, moved to Waterford 11 years ago and is now most definitely a Tramore woman.
“When I came out of college, there wasn't a job to be had, and I ended up getting kind of a temporary position in Waterford, where I had never even been before, never heard of before. I got the JJ Kavangh’s bus down myself with a few bags and moved my whole life here at 23,” said Nicola.
Nicola had a job for now and a new home, but there was just one problem: all her friends were back in Dublin. So, she set about finding a hobby, and as the fates (and no small amount of moxie) would have it, she landed on acting.
“I just looked up Facebook for auditions and things, and there was an open audition for a play. I'd never been to an audition. I didn't know what that was. So I ended up learning off the whole script for the whole play, every part, which is unhinged. I thought that's what you had to do. I went. I told a few lies, and I said, ‘Oh yeah, I'm a big deal in Dublin’, and I ended up getting the main role.
"So then that was my first time on stage, but nobody knew it was my first time on stage, and it went well,” said Nicola.
Nicola caught the theatre bug but didn’t get another part for a while, so she wrote her own. The Afters, a set of five monologues on life-defining moments, was Nicola’s first foray into playwriting.
“They were stories that I'd heard over the years, like, you know, drunk in the bathrooms of a pub, and a stranger opens up to you about something, or like, you know, just different situations where somebody had kind of trusted me with something really precious in their life that changed the course of their life for them,” said Nicola.
She reached out to those people to find out if they would be willing to allow her to write anonymised versions of their stories and five said yes.
Nicola wrote the script and asked some performers she admired if they would star in it with her and they were in.
The play opened in January 2018 at Waterford Gallery of Art and starred Ben Quinlan, Gráinne Kavanagh, Ciara O’Connor, Damien McDonnell and Nicola, with live music by Derek Flynn.
“So I got two for one. I got friends, and I got a hobby. And yeah, the rest is history," said Nicola.
In 2020, Nicola went on to write and stage Five Year Plan at Garter Lane and in January this year her radio play Mea Culpa hit the airwaves via WLR.
Dark but funny Mea Culpa follows Clara/Erin as she travels to Waterford to meet her birth mother at a funeral, and no, she wasn’t expected, and yes, she got more than she bargained for.
It starred Nicola as the lead, along with Greta Rochford, Michael Power, Angie Goma and Lisa Kennedy and was directed by Jim Nolan.
The play started life as a course project with her friend Gayle Corrigan, who was completing a certificate in Radio and Podcasting at SETU. When the course finished, the pair applied for funding to develop the piece and Mea Culpa was born.
But behind the wit and sarcasm is a very serious topic and one very important to Nicola; Nicola is an adopted person. Sick of seeing idealised fairytale-like stories in the media, Nicola wanted to show the messy, traumatic and nuanced experience of finding one's biological parents.
“I suppose I've always felt frustrated because when I tell people I'm adopted, their first question is, ‘And have you tracked down your birth family?" said Nicola.
“Because that's what people are always interested in, and then their frame of reference is pretty much always one of those shows, like Long Lost Family, and they're like, 'And was it so emotional? And was it brilliant?’ And I found myself getting annoyed at that because I'm like, ‘No, it's so layered, it's so complicated. There's joy, and there's trauma.
“But then I thought to myself, ‘Well, how can they know that if they've never seen it represented anywhere, so I just try to do my bit to build that representation."
Mea Culpa is currently nominated in the drama category in this year’s IMRO awards, which take place in Kilkenny on October 2.
But that is not all. The story does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, but fear not, part two is on the way.
Nicola said it is funding-dependent but most definitely in the works.
“It's in the oven. It's called Tua Culpa.
“WLR has been hugely supportive and has signed on as broadcast partner again in principle. And Jim Nolan has been hugely supportive and has agreed to direct it, and the cast have agreed to come back. So everything's in place but the money,” said Nicola.
August brought one of Nicola’s proudest moments when she was selected as one of 100 actors chosen from the 1,400 applicants to audition in front of the casting director at the Abbey Theatre.
So Nicola returned to the big smoke, but after her 11 years in Waterford, she now calls the Déise home, and she wanted to take it with her.
Her friend and Red Kettle Theatre Company founder Jim Nolan helped Nicola prepare and lent her a piece to perform.
“I was glad to go and fly the flag for Waterford. And even though it's my adopted home - I’m from Dublin - I’m really proud I got to do a Waterford piece and tell a Waterford story,” said Nicola.
In the meantime, Nicola is back on stage with her new work, The Patron Saint of Side Chicks, which is set to run at this year’s Imagine Arts Festival this October.
The story follows a successful young woman who finds herself in the unenviable situation of being someone’s side chick.
“We see side chicks in, like, the media, and they're kind of these pathetic figures, or like gold diggers, or there's something in demand that they want in an ulterior motive sort of way.
“But I haven't seen the story of a successful woman who's really brilliant and really well resourced in her own right somehow falling into this situation, and yet I've seen it play out in my life and the lives of those around me, so that's why I wanted to do that take on it,” said Nicola.
The Patron Saint of Side Chicks was written as a novel, a change of pace for the actress and playwright. But as Nicola said, “it never really found a home” until now.
“I just put it in a drawer and forgot about it. But a friend who I had shown it to would bring it up every few months and be like, 'Come on, what are you doing with that book?'
"And he said to me, 'Would you ever think about putting it into a different medium'.
"The stage is one that I'm really comfortable with. So I thought, yeah, maybe one day, perhaps. And then the next day, Imagine contacted me and said, 'Have you anything for our lunchtime theatre series?' I said, okay, there we go. I'll do that.
The Patron Saint of Side Chicks will be on during the Lunchtime Theatre series at St Patrick’s Gateway on October 21 at 1pm.
