{"id":301185,"date":"2026-01-24T11:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T11:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/301185\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T11:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T11:18:09","slug":"people-love-anne-and-it-really-touches-me-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/301185\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018People love Anne, and it really touches me\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philippa Dunne is back in her old neighbourhood. As a student in Dublin<\/a>, the Amandaland star rented with a group of girls near the Black Church, close to the Gate Theatre<\/a>, never imagining as she walked past the theatre every morning that she would one day be on its stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was for real actors. It was like, that\u2019s where real actors go and work, and that\u2019s serious business in there now,\u201d she says from a backstage sofa at the Gate, where she will soon appear in Eureka Day, an ensemble comedy following an inclusive, liberal-minded school in Berkeley, California<\/a>, as it deals with a health scare.<\/p>\n

As I meet Dunne, she is in the third week of rehearsals with the cast and director Roy Alexander Weise. It\u2019s been an \u201cintense, but great intense\u201d period in which they have \u201ctalked about every inch and every angle of each page\u201d of Jonathan Spector\u2019s play.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s such an indulgence, and I absolutely love it. It\u2019s what makes the thing so amazing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She hasn\u2019t done \u201clive stuff\u201d for years, and the last time she did it was with her friends from the comedy group Diet of Worms, \u201call very relaxed\u201d. But last year she got the urge to keep things interesting for herself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was kind of, like, I daren\u2019t think about theatre, because that\u2019s too terrifying,\u201d she says. \u201cBut whenever I worked in Ireland and was around other Irish actors, I was always so envious of how close they were, because they all knew each other through theatre. I thought I would love to get that camaraderie.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Eureka Day, Dunne plays Suzanne, one of five school board members trying to navigate their way through a mumps outbreak.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0The Gate\u2019s new season: Eureka Day, An Ideal Husband and Poor top the billOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re all very highly educated people. They love a back and forth,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Each character has a different take on vaccines, but the play \u2013 first performed in Berkeley in 2018 \u2013 is not strictly about vaccination.<\/p>\n

\n

Anne has a breaking point, but she\u2019s just very gentle. She genuinely wants the best for everyone. She wants the best for Amanda<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Philippa Dunne<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about how people, through their own trauma, through their own viewpoints on the world, through their own position in the world, come to the decisions they make, and the consequences of that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can take life as black and white. It\u2019s actually this big splodge of grey.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dunne has relocated to Dublin for the run, though there will be \u201ca little bit of commuting\u201d back to southwest London, where she lives with her husband and their five-year-old daughter.<\/p>\n

She was in Dublin last summer to shoot Tall Tales & Murder, Stuart Carolan\u2019s upcoming RT\u00c9-BBC screwball crime drama, and also the summer before that to make RT\u00c9 family series Showkids.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love getting back to Ireland, and that\u2019s why, when the Gate approached me, I knew I really wanted to get back and perform to an Irish audience. I will always come back to Ireland for work, in a heartbeat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dunne, now 44, describes herself as being from both Dublin and Mayo, having been born in the capital to Dublin parents, before moving west when she was three.<\/p>\n

\"14\/01\/202614\/01\/2026 – NEWS – Actor Philippa Dunne for the Magazine. Laura Slattery Interview. Photograph: Alan Betson \/ The Irish Times <\/p>\n

Growing up in Castlebar with her two brothers, she consumed as much comedy as she could. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air was an early favourite, then she watched her brother\u2019s borrowed copies of satires Brass Eye and The Day Today, which \u201cled into [Alan] Partridge\u201d and various stand-up DVDs. She discovered she loved it all.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans are really well able to create misery and gloom, but the flip side is that we can create amazing laughter. We have both traits in us. It\u2019s that power of creation. I can create a laugh and it lifts the whole room. It\u2019s amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

She decided she wanted to be an actor at the age of just four, but when friends told her speech and drama classes involved learning poems, she was unimpressed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere wasn\u2019t enough drama in it for me. I was like, where\u2019s the drama?\u201d<\/p>\n

The one third-level drama course, at Trinity College Dublin, had something like 26 places for the whole country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went for it, and I spectacularly failed, because I had no performance experience. I didn\u2019t know how to audition, so it was an absolute wreck. I was devastated that I didn\u2019t get in.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DietDiet of Worms <\/p>\n

Happily, while doing an arts degree in UCD \u2013 she laughs as she tells me she studied archaeology and Greek and Roman civilisation \u2013 she met her \u201cfour mates\u201d (Amy Stephenson, Rory Connolly, Niall Gaffney and Shane Langan). They formed Diet of Worms and spent the Noughties taking sketch shows to the Edinburgh fringe \u2013 in 2007 they performed a month-long festival run in a swimming pool, with water up to their waists.<\/p>\n

\u201cBonkers. These are the things you only do in your 20s,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Eventually she got an agent and started \u201cplugging away\u201d. Some comedy fans will recognise Dunne as Geraldine Devlin, Clare\u2019s mam in Derry Girls, but her big breakthrough role arrived a couple of years earlier when she was cast as kind-hearted, easily exploited Anne in the hit BBC sitcom Motherland, which ran for three series from 2016.<\/p>\n

The good news for Dunne was that Anne made the leap into last year\u2019s successful spin-off, Amandaland, in which she reconnected with her \u201cBFF\u201d, the more alpha Amanda (Lucy Punch). \u201cThey come as a package,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Amandaland review: Sharon Horgan comedy spin-off stands firmly on its own two feetOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

Anne is soft and socially awkward, but she does occasionally show she has it within herself to stand up to Amanda.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe has a breaking point, but she\u2019s just very gentle. She genuinely wants the best for everyone. She wants the best for Amanda. She will go to the ends of the earth for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unlike the Californian characters in Eureka Day, who have no qualms about stating their opinion, or Amanda, whose insecurity manifests as vanity, Anne is a humble person. \u201cShe just doesn\u2019t brag,\u201d Dunne says.<\/p>\n

\"Amandaland,Amandaland: Philippa Dunne, Lucy Punch and Joanna Lumley. Photograph: BBC <\/p>\n

Everyone behind Amandaland is \u201cthrilled and relieved in equal measure\u201d that the spin-off has found its audience, and Dunne knows from encounters with the show\u2019s fans that viewers are fond of Anne, the taken-for-granted underdog with a chemistry PhD and a talent for making sausage rolls.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople love Anne, and it really touches me. It really makes me feel good.\u201d<\/p>\n

At home in Ireland, there\u2019s no getting ahead of herself, however. On Christmas Day, about 10 people in her family sat down to watch the Amandaland festive special at her brother\u2019s house in Galway.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time it was finished, it was just me and my mam. Everybody had got up and walked away! I was, like, okay, great leveller.\u201d<\/p>\n

With its cast of children now in their teens, Amandaland swaps the school gates of Motherland for the football-pitch sidelines, meaning that Anne remains further along the parenting journey than Dunne herself.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did have a bit of imposter syndrome on Motherland because I was like, what is all this?\u201d she says \u201cAnd then I had my own child and the penny finally dropped, what the school-gate business meant. It was just, ah, right, I get what this is about now. I get the stress of it all, and the noise and the panic and the sheer volume of people all of the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"PhilippaPhilippa Dunne: ‘If I hear an audience laughing in the Gate, I know that will kick something off in me.’ Photograph: Alan Betson <\/p>\n

Amandaland \u2013 which was co-created by Sharon Horgan<\/a> and made by her production company, Merman \u2013 is poised to return to BBC One this year, with the second series, written by co-creator Holly Walsh and Laurence Rickard, already completed.<\/p>\n

When Dunne was on set filming the Christmas episode with Joanna Lumley, who plays Amanda\u2019s mother, Felicity, and guest-star Jennifer Saunders, she tried to \u201cabsorb every single second\u201d of it, she says.<\/p>\n

Then she \u201cdid the really cringey thing\u201d of asking the reunited Absolutely Fabulous pair for a picture together, because she wants to remember, in years to come, that she really did get to work with them.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd they\u2019re very sound, very normal, lovely women, so it was just a pleasure.\u201d<\/p>\n

She wants to keep diversifying, keep pushing herself, and work with as many different people as she can. She foresees more live comedy in her future, if only because the gratification of an instant audience response can be addictive.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I hear an audience laughing in the Gate, I know that will kick something off in me and I\u2019ll need to keep hearing that.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s also keen to keep working as long as possible.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I can work into my 80s, into my 90s, I will. I come from a long line of women who live into their 100s. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ll be working in my 100s, but you\u2019ll have to force me out of the job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eureka Day is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, January 30th-March 7th. Amandaland is on RT\u00c9 Player<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Philippa Dunne is back in her old neighbourhood. As a student in Dublin, the Amandaland star rented with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301186,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[3412,1374,52,18,117,43856,19,17,361,2354,1181,58035,63,8660],"class_list":{"0":"post-301185","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-bbc","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-dublin","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-gate-theatre","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-magazine","17":"tag-mayo","18":"tag-rte","19":"tag-sharon-horgan","20":"tag-trinity-college-dublin-tcd","21":"tag-vaccine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115949804324315913","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301185\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}