Lyn Gardner Talks Heartsink at Riverside Studios
Published on 15 April 2026
Summary
- Lyn Gardner speaks to the cast and writer of Heartsink
- Farine Clarke on creating new play Heartsink
- Kathy Kiera Clarke on Derry Girls and returning to new writing
Best known to millions around the world as Aunt Sarah in the hit TV show Derry Girls, Northern Irish actress Kathy Kiera Clarke was already well established as a stage actor when she found fame in Lisa McGee’s much-loved comedy. I saw her as Grace in Brian Friel’s mighty Faith Healer at Bristol Old Vic giving a mesmerising performance in a mesmerising play. She has played Lady Macbeth and Medea and was in the Royal Court premiere of Conor McPherson’s Shining City. She is definitely no slouch.
This week she can be found at Riverside in a new play, Heartsink, in which she plays Cara, one of those patients who haunt GP’s surgeries and who used to be known by GPs as “heartsink” patients, a disused term describing those who, every time they step through the door, cause the doctor’s heart to sink because they take up a disproportionate amount of time.
But as Dr Jeffrey Longford (played by Aden Gillett) discovers, there is much more to Cara than it first appears. “What I’m bringing to the table,” says the writer, former GP Farine Clarke, “is my own experience of being a doctor, although it was a very long time ago, and my interest in looking at what happens when the doctor suddenly finds himself in the position of being a patient.” It is something that she herself knows because a few years ago she had a kidney transplant. Heartsink is by no means autobiographical, but she does say that it was having the transplant which made her realise she had to seize the day and invest in becoming a full-time playwright.
Heartsink is a comedy but one which encompasses grief which is manifest in many different ways, and Kathy Kiera Clarke says that she knew she was going to do the play as soon as she read it, not least because she has been dealing with her own grief: her mother died just over a year ago.
“Grief changes you,” says Clarke, “and after the initial wretched grief that you think will never ever shift, it can move into something more nourishing.” She says that there was one particular speech Cara has in the play which spoke directly to her because as “you navigate grief; it changes your relationship to religion or spirituality, and you learn to live your life in a different way."
Which Clarke herself has had to do since the end of the final series of Derry Girls, pointing out that there are many kinds of grief and letting go of character like Sarah can be tricky.
“You have such an intense time working with a company of people who you grow to love and who are like family, and then it’s over. And playing Sarah was such a joy because she grew organically from Lisa’s ideas and my input. She became this almost innocent sage who said such wise things, and there was such freedom in playing a character like that; playing her was like having a holiday from my own head. She kept Kathy’s more cynical voice at bay."
If some of the younger cast of Derry Girls have been able to use the show as a launch pad, Clarke says that as an Irish actor of a certain age the opportunities are fewer. “There are so many wonderful Irish actresses around my age, and I really don’t want to sound ungrateful for what was such a divine opportunity as Derry Girls, but it has been a double-edged sword because it is almost as if the body of work I did before Derry Girls doesn’t exist because that is what happens when you become associated with one very strong character.”
It’s a story I’ve heard from other actors, where a big TV success narrows the range of parts they are offered because everyone wants them to play a variation on the character they have become so strongly associated with. “But Sarah was a one-off,” says Clarke, who says she can’t and doesn’t want to keep reprising her in various guises. She knows she has so much more to offer.
Playing Cara, who is very different from Sarah, in a play which she describes as “a surprising, tender play about two people who would ordinarily never cross paths with each other but who have a huge unexpected impact on each other’s lives" is, says Clarke, enormously refreshing, and she is delighted to be back at the coalface of new writing with which she has so long been associated.
“New plays are what it’s all about,” she says. “They are such a risk because they need to find an audience, but it is new work which keeps theatre alive. And when they work, they are soul-enriching." For audiences, as well as artists.
Heartsink plays at Riverside Studios until Sun 10th May. Book your tickets today.
By Lyn Gardner
Lyn Gardner is an acclaimed theatre journalist and former critic with decades of experience covering British theatre, from off-West End and fringe theatre to major West End productions.