Winner of the Stewart Parker Award for her play The Half Of It, actress and writer Karen Cogan brings her dark comedy, Drip Feed, about growing up female and queer in 1990’s Ireland, to this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival.

Photo by Jonny Birch.

I grew up in Cork city. I took long breaks from school in Turners Cross to make bad films and join theatre companies. ended up at Trinity doing an English and Theatre Studies degree. It was far less practical than I’d hoped and dropped out. An excellent friend died suddenly and woke up to the fact that we don’t necessarily have decades to make the right choices, so started hustling up work as an actor and auditioning for drama schools.

I became an actor by telling stories and listening to them. I would sit on the landline for hours with friends making up stories and talking about sex and heartbreak. Another pal and would sit across from each other and try to tell each other the saddest story we could muster until one of us cried. It feels obnoxious in hindsight, but it was about exploring empathy – the fact that the world was bigger than us and bigger than Cork.

I couldn’t believe it when got into RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London in 2007. I’d had their prospectus on my wall since age 15 and thought it was an unattainable idyll. work with young people now to encourage them to audition for the intimidating places they feel are not ‘for them’.

When I was poured out into the melee of actors in London, I was crushed to find that the acting industry can be horrendously uncreative and fairly misogynistic. spent more time thinking about my body weight and asymmetrical face than did about the work. It was stifling rather than freeing.

I was told I’d work more when hit 40, because then could play the Irish mams. I was told to dress differently in auditions, that was weird looking, that lipstick aged me and shouldn’t wear it… the list goes on. Like so many other women, started taking it into my own hands. asked RADA for a room for free, brought some actors in and started improvising and devising, and ultimately made a play was proud of.

‘Drip Feed’ is about growing up female and queer in Cork in the 1990’s, but none of the play is autobiographical. It’s a ‘What If’ – what if the most obsessive, messy part of anyone’s life was frozen in time and they couldn’t move on? I’ve had comments about the unabashed openness of the work. We hear about men’s bodies and experiences and all of the multifaceted colours of their complex experiences all the time, women in plays do not need to be heroes or angels to be worthwhile.

I think having a queer feminist political view will always affect my artistic output. I’m constantly aware of the patriarchal capitalist structures within which we make theatre. The system has a financially centered, patriarchal bent. You hear things like ‘why are all your characters gay’ or ‘why aren’t there any men in it?’ I’m conscious that it’s time to redress the balance, to let the pendulum swing the other way. We haven’t even started hearing the plethora of complex queer stories that need to be told, let alone trans stories and the stories of people of colour in the LGBT+ community.

Winning the Stewart Parker Award for ‘The Half Of It’ was utterly galvanising and emotional and joyful. A few days later was programmed by Soho Theatre for Edinburgh and a London run; had a great literary agent and was in TV meetings. It was very quick after a slow couple of years. But it’s in the slow years that you do the best work, sitting with boredom and frustration and making work in spite of it.

A change is happening for women in the industry, but it’s glacial. was on a panel at the Traverse Theatre the other day and a woman said she had had an almost identical panel chat in 1960. The effects of #MeToo, #WTF are being felt but think most women will tell you there is still an awful lot of shite to wade through before you can just start doing your job.

‘Drip Feed’ is now a pilot script in development with Witchery Pictures, and have four other television projects in development in the UK too – all of them filled with women and queer people! We need to see and hear stories that are only just starting to be told on mainstream platforms.

’Drip Feed’ runs from September 19 -22 in Project Arts Centre as part of the Dublin Fringe Festival and from September 24 to October 20 in Soho Theatre, London, www.fringefest.com