"I was encouraged to start writing plays about two years ago when Fishamble Theatre Company ran a national playwriting competition. I submitted a short play that was produced as part of the award winning Whereabouts in July 2006."

Jody O'Neill is explaining how she made the transition from actress to writer. Originally from Dublin, but raised in Cork since the age of three, Jodie has been performing almost as long as she can remember. "I've been involved in the arts most of my life to some extent. I started dancing when I was four and from when I was ten, attended my mother's weekly drama workshops.

"I moved to Dublin after I left school to pursue a career in acting. I studied on the Actor Training Programme at Trinity College, Ireland's only degree in acting, which Trinity have recently decided to discontinue much to the disappointment of staff, graduates, present students, prospective students and the theatre community in general. I was a member of Activate Youth Theatre during my teens and first encountered John McCarthy, who plays Paudie in They Never Froze Walt Disney through the youth theatre."

The curiously titled production begins it's second run this week, following on from a successful inaugural run during this years Midsummers Festival. A tragic, but oddly comical production, TNFWD traces the lives of Marie (Jody) and Paudie (John), from the 1960's to present day, flashing between their first encounters and the highly suspicious circumstances that reunite them many years later.

"On my return to Cork last year," says Jodie, "Jack, who was setting up Theatre Makers at the time, invited me to become a member of the company's affiliated ‘Working Actors' Workshop'. Most of the people involved in this production are members of Working Actors' Workshop, through which the play was developed.

"The idea for the play originated just over a year ago. Paudie and Marie were two characters that emerged from improvisations that John and I did one Wednesday afternoon during the Working Actors' Workshop. The characters really stuck with me and so I decided to write some scenes. I didn't set out at the beginning with any intentions other than to see what story these characters could tell. A few weeks later, I had the general shape of the play which tells the story of Marie and Paudie, switching between their brief, clandestine romance in their early twenties and the unusual circumstances under which they meet again in their sixties.

"Without giving away too much of the story, Marie, by the time she reaches her sixties is on a course of destruction and Paudie, driven by guilt about the past, sets out to try to save her from herself. The characters exist in a small village where everyone knows everyone and private business is public knowledge. By the time they reach their sixties, the village is changed by arrival of the Celtic Tiger and there is a sense of them inhabiting a world they no longer quite understand or fit into.

Jodie continues on the point of this changing Ireland. "Even though our culture is changing and has altered rapidly and irrevocably in recent times, it is impossible to get away from the old traditions upon which our cultural identity was formed. There is a tendency to place rural Ireland and 'the good old days' into a box and lock it away but our current culture has grown from this and there are still many people who exist in the traditional ways, influenced of course by the arrival of Lidl, juice bars and take-out coffee but still embracing older values."

It's difficult to see how humour could play a part in a production, that, on face value at least, is quite bleak. But as those who saw TNFWD during the Midsummers Festival will attest, humour does indeed play its part, albeit black humour, a reflection, as Jodie points out, of a typical Irish mentality. "Dark humour is an integral part of They Never Froze Walt Disney. In Ireland, I think we tend to mask our troubles with humour and reveal most through what we choose not to say. The joy of employing these devices in writing is that the characters can be enduring huge sorrow whilst the audience laughs but ultimately the audience empathises more with the characters because they have engaged with them on a very human level.