Actress and writer Nieve Hearity speaks to the ECHO about her new show at Liverpool’s Epstein Theatre
“It’s going to sound terrible, but the only thing I was good at at school was acting,” says Nieve Hearity. The 41-year-old, who is originally from West Derby, fell in love with acting when she was younger after getting life changing advice from her grandma.
Nieve told the ECHO: “I wouldn’t say boo to a goose, and one day my grandma said ‘You’ve just got to pretend you’re confident’. Around 11 and 12, I started really pretending that I was this big confident person. It ended up sticking and something I just realised is that you can be other characters and you can escape through other characters.
“It just resonated with me and that was it. I knew that I was going to be an actor or be involved in the creative industry in some way.”
Nieve started drama lessons at YULA Drama School, and was able to study performing arts at sixth form after it was introduced at St Edward’s School, before moving to London. She also got into writing after taking a break from acting due to a health scare in her 30s. She’s since played Karen in BBC’s The Responder.
Now, Nieve is set to bring Mummylogues to Liverpool’s Epstein Theatre on Saturday, April 25. The one-night-only show, which she created, is made up of a variety of monologues centred around the “darker side of motherhood” that people “don’t really talk about”.
Nieve said she was inspired to create Mummylogues after hearing about a loved one’s personal experience with trying for a baby. She said: “No one really talked about the struggles that she’d gone through and how she felt. I just couldn’t understand. It’s such a huge thing that happens to so many women, but we just don’t talk about it.
“So, with her permission, I wrote a monologue which she adored because it was exactly what she was feeling. After performing it, I thought there’s so much that we as women don’t talk about. We don’t talk about the dark side of motherhood.
“When you think about people on Instagram with these perfect photos and the kids are all well behaved, they’re dressed perfectly and everyone’s happy and smiling, but that’s just not the reality.
“People can feel less than, if you’re stuck at home, you’ve been up all night with the baby and on Instagram you’ve got these influencers with the perfect kids and the perfect life.
“Off the back of that, I just started writing monologues about, personally for me, what I thought was the dark side of motherhood, you know, the miscarriages, the not wanting to get pregnant, the struggle to get pregnant, having a kid that you don’t really like.
“One of the monologues is about a woman who has a son and she adores him and then he falls victim to knife crime.
“There’s that saying isn’t there, having a child is living with your heart outside your chest for the rest of your life.”
The performance will be bittersweet for Nieve, who lost her own mum suddenly a few months ago. It was her mum who had encouraged her to ask the Epstein Theatre if she could put on her show after they attended the theatre’s reopening production.
Nieve added: “I was going to cancel the show because she was the inspiration for everything. But my dad said ‘no, you’ve got to go ahead with it because she would have loved it’.
“I’m really excited about performing and performing for my mum as well. Her name’s Lorraine Hearity and she is the heart and soul of it all.
“She’s read every monologue I’ve ever written. She gave fantastic feedback. Not a writer, not an actor or anything. She was just brilliant.”
More information about the show can be found on the Epstein Theatre website.
