TERRY PRONE, the PR guru and media commentator who started her career as an actress, is returning to the stage for one night only — playing herself.
Prone will be performing in It’s My Party Conference (and I’ll Cry If I Want To). The play is written by Stefanie Preissner, who received critical acclaim for her 2012 work Solpadeine is My Boyfriend, and will be staged as part of next month’s Tiger Dublin Fringe. Prone will be one of four “actors” playing themselves in the work.
The play is about politics, self-indulgence and making theatre. Prone will ask “tough questions” of Preissner and her work in theatre, as well as delivering the keynote speech. Prone is writing the speech herself and said she was under instructions to “brief the audience as if they were candidates attending an Ardfheis”.
Prone, founder of the Communications Clinic, said she was looking forward to the play, which runs for just one night.
“I’ll get to say things that I never otherwise get a chance to say, starting with, ‘You’re out of your cotton-picking mind if you’re ever going to be a political candidate’,” she said. “I’ll be covering the myth about appearance and spin doctors.”
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Prone started acting in her teens and, at 16, attended the Abbey theatre’s acting school, replacing Joan O’Hara in Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun when O’Hara became pregnant.
She said she stopped acting because she was fat. “I was about 19 when the artistic director of the Abbey [Hugh Hunt] summoned me and told me I was hugely talented,” she said. “But I was so overweight I was always playing character roles — in other words middle-aged women. And he had middle-aged actresses ready to play middle-aged women.”
“I had tried so often to lose weight and I couldn’t do it. I went into radio where they can’t see you.”
It’s My Party Conference (and I’ll Cry If I Want To) will be performed at Smock Alley theatre in Dublin on September 14. Four performers will play version of themselves: Prone, Preissner, Kris Nelson, artistic director of Dublin Fringe, and Ruth Hegarty, an actress.