MAEVE RYAN
PERFORMANCE COACH
Improv and Film
For the film Before, BFI-programmed and funded director Christopher O’Donnell asked Maeve to lead improvisation workshops with actor Ruth Posner to help him create a script about Alzheimers. Maeve used this writing method again, to create the short film Compliance. Maeve was then asked by filmmaker Thomas Michaelson of Trader Films to be Improvisation Consultant on the short film The Man With His Fingers In His Ears, produced by Dame Emma Thompson. Maeve scripted the play Aoife and Eve with actors Anne-Marie Gailliard and Holly Quinn. Aoife and Eve had an R&D showing at Oxford House, co-produced with Dante or Die theatre, and its second act was written by Maeve using improvisation techniques. Maeve has devised and written eight new plays with the young people of the charity Dream Arts, over four years, which were performed in professional theatres. She was also an actor/writer on the long-running online satirical comedy British Rationals.
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Maeve's writing method relies upon her training in improvisation at The Second City, Hoopla Impro and The Spontaneity Shop, as well as her training in Uta Hagen's Object Exercises and Chekhov's gravities whilst studying for a MA in Acting under scholarship at Arts Ed London. Backstories are detailed, research is done, improvisations explore character, then the dialogue is improvised, recorded and edited over a long period of time.
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Maeve is also a producer of London's seminal female/non-binary improvisation night LadyProv, at Hoopla Impro. With LadyProv, she has produced the short films Debbie Does Dulwich for the London Improvised Film Festival, and Compliance. Maeve’s improvisation work for film led her to co-producing a film for the London Transport Museum’s digital archive, which was exhibited as part of the Hidden London exhibition. She co-produced ‘The Language of Shadows' with Green Heart Theatre company, which was a series of new Irish writing for The Rosemary Branch Theatre Festival, London. Maeve is a senior teacher in improvisation for the UK’s foremost Improvisation school, Hoopla Impro for which she directs improv shows for graduating students, and teaches devising and improvisation to second year BA students for LMA/Regent's University. She was in the inaugural cohort of Film Directing4Women. She is a published theatre reviewer for The Play's The Thing. Maeve is certified in PACE, a model which helps her to establish safer relationships with colleagues and aims to give everyone space to contribute their talent.
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​Scripts in development
Sheila is dead and has left a note: she wishes for her body to be prepared in the traditional Irish way. She wants her wife and sister to do it together. Meanwhile, the seminal Equal marriage referendum in Ireland plays out on TV in the background. Home to Vote explores themes of grief, reckoning and acceptance and captures an Irish cultural ritual around death that contributes to the transcendence of all three characters.
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Breda has a lot of housework to do – but first, she needs to avenge the one who harmed her lover. Baked Alaska inserts the Irish Mammy trope into a Tarantino-style Western, and explores her power.
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In an alternative timeline, the hegemony of Catholic Church hasn’t disappeared in Ireland and continues to shape misogynistic views. Yet capitalism continues to push sexual mores. As The Lovey Girls Competition is broadcast on TV, a secret group of activists plan to free women from their ‘Lovely Girl’ prison.
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It’s 1992. Ghost Train follows a thirteen-year old and her best friend to their first teenage disco, where the misogynistic culture prevalent in their town threatens to stop them blossoming before they even begin..
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Kick It! is based upon Maeve's memories of an all-girls Gaelic Football team she and her friends founded as children.