He's 'the one who set me up with my acting' - Niamh Algar

“I’m here visiting the first director I ever had,” Niamh Algar said at Mullingar Arts Centre this morning.

She was chatting to Sean Lynch “the one who set me up with my acting”.

Asked if she remembered her first production under Sean’s direction, Niamh had a clear memory: “We did Les Mis. He cast me as a nun in the first act and a prostitute in the second, so since then I’ve had the range for diverse characters."

Niamh said she started at the arts centre at around the age of 12, when she finished primary school.

"He always taught me that ‘this isn’t a school – we’re not teachers here’.

“Sean was the only one that would introduce us to work like The Plough and the Stars - plays that we never learned in school. This, for me, was my education into English studies, really, because he’d hand us these scripts, and we’d have to try to make sense of them.

“If we didn’t understand them, we’d have to try to explain them to him the best we could.

“You never felt like a kid when you were in here, he never undermined us, you were treated equally, and because of that you listened – you were treated with respect within these walls.

“I always enjoyed walking in through these doors, and I didn’t want to leave, so much so that my mam would be doing laps of the roundabout waiting for me to come out.

"It would’ve been 10 o’clock by the time we’d get out of here, and we lived out of the tuck shop in the Topic, lived on diet of pick 'n' mix and cola balls!”

Niamh was home in Mullingar with Lorne Macfadyen, an actor colleague from the Isle of Skye; the pair have just finished filming on a series called Malpractice, a medical thriller which will be on ITV next year.