Deirdre O’Kane: ‘This year I’m going to get Christmas right. I say that every year’

Blame it on the jigs and reels. As a child, the actor and comedian Deirdre O’Kane was no slouch at Irish dancing, a skill that would leave her accustomed to applause.

“I think it’s true for any kid that does sports or anything like that,” says the Louth-born star. “If you get the pat on the back, it creates something that needs to be fed.”

O’Kane, who has trod the boards at the Abbey, the Gate and Druid, never intended to become a stand-up, but fate had other plans. In 1995, her husband, the director Stephen Bradley, asked Deirdre to ride shotgun while he filmed Kilkenny’s Cat Laughs Festival.

“I had never actually seen live comedy before,” she recalls. “It wasn’t so big then. There were certainly no women around, that was for sure. There were 45 people on the bill that year, and only three of those were women.”

A fan of Anthony Clark, a comedian with a recurring role on Ellen, O'Kane was so taken with his act that she saw it again. And again. Until finally . . .

“The penny dropped,” she says. “This wasn’t stream of consciousness. He had sat down and wrote a script. He didn’t change a word in his act. A lot of people think comics perform in the moment. I thought that. But in reality only about 10 per cent of your show might be improvised. Even people like Jason Byrne, who love to improvise, script about 70 per cent. As an actor, I had never been all that mad about the classics; the thing that excited me was new writing. And this was new writing, with none of the etiquette that comes with theatre.”

She laughs. “I certainly wouldn’t have been the funny one at school,” she says. I think my classmates from school – secondary school in particular – are astounded by how things turned out.”

Sure enough, this Cat Laughs epiphany had an immediate effect: “I started writing in the car on the way home and I played that same festival the next year. It was that fast.”

She's not kidding about the speed. By 1996, she was a finalist at the BBC New Comedy Awards; by 2001, she had a solo show with tour dates in Australia, China, London and Prague, and a leading role in RTÉ's Paths to Freedom.

"Crossing over from the club circuit into theatres is a big step, and you need telly to do it," she says. "The recession hit TV budgets hard and fewer comics were given the breaks. I had stuff like Paths to Freedom and Fergus's Wedding, which was fab. You need that profile. There are plenty of female comics who are ready to cross over, who are good at it, but who haven't had those breaks."

Gender remains a live issue in comedy, she believes.

“The more prominent women there are, the more other women will follow,” she says. “We need more Amy Schumers. We need more Melissa McCarthys. I’m still asked what it is like to be a woman comic. The numbers haven’t changed drastically. There are a lot more women doing it, but there’s not a lot breaking through.”

The past few years have been "a bit nuts", as she succinctly puts it. Her award-winning turn as the charity worker Christina Noble in the biopic Noble (2014) required three years of graft. Since 2012, she has played the part of the titular protagonist's mother in Chris O'Dowd's Moone Boy. Last year, following an eight-year hiatus, she returned to stand-up.

It’s quite a workload. No wonder her Christmases haven’t always gone smoothly.

"The year of the snow, all the presents got stuck in London," she says. "We spent hours on a runway. I had to run to the pound shop in Rathmines and dash around Aldi for bits for dinner, just so the kids would wake up to something. It was like Siberia. I didn't get warm all day. Then we had the kids with us in Vietnam, filming Noble. And I got food poisoning. This year I'm going to get it right. I say that every year though."

She likes to joke that she and her husband sold their Dublin house and moved to London a day before the crash: “You turn your back for five minutes and recession hits.”

She suspects that same economic catastrophe has severely dented Ireland’s once thriving Christmas party scene.

“Growing up, we had a period of about 10 years when Christmas was really, really great,” she says. “We did midnight Mass. Then, on Christmas Day, we went to a family called the Morgans – Rita and Fred – and their seven children. And then everybody went home for the dinner. Then off to the Carney house on Stephen’s Day. And then we were the Stephen’s Day evening house.

“I remember poker was big. It was a lovely thing to have. I don’t care about presents. Anything over the €20 is overboard. But where have all the parties gone? I keep saying to Stephen, ‘We need to be The House, the house that people go to at Christmas’.”

She’s about to get her chance. She and Bradley recently returned to live in Dublin with their two children, Holly (11) and Daniel (seven). They had resided in Chiswick for most of the past decade, until that particular west London borough became “overrun with bankers”.

“This year will be our first Dublin Christmas in a long time, and also the first in our own home in Dublin in ages,” she says. “Because when we did come home from Christmas, we were always the guest.”

Being a guest rather than a host means she’s a little bit rusty as a “turkey cooker”.

“I wish I was a brilliant cook, but I’m not,” she says. “The husband is better at the turkey than me. I can muck in. I buy the stuffing. I peel the spuds. And I always make sure the chef has a full glass.”

– Deirdre O'Kane: 1Dee is at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, on Thursday, December 1st