Philippa Dunne is back in her old neighbourhood. As a student in Dublin, the Amandaland star rented with a group of girls near the Black Church, close to the Gate Theatre, never imagining as she walked past the theatre every morning that she would one day be on its stage.“That was for real actors. It was like, that’s where real actors go and work, and that’s serious business in there now,” she says from a backstage sofa at the Gate, where she will soon appear in Eureka Day, an ensemble comedy following an inclusive, liberal-minded school in Berkeley, California, as it deals with a health scare.As I meet Dunne, she is in the third week of rehearsals with the cast and director Roy Alexander Weise. It’s been an “intense, but great intense” period in which they have “talked about every inch and every angle of each page” of Jonathan Spector’s play.“It’s such an indulgence, and I absolutely love it. It’s what makes the thing so amazing,” she says.She hasn’t done “live stuff” for years, and the last time she did it was with her friends from the comedy group Diet of Worms, “all very relaxed”. But last year she got the urge to keep things interesting for herself.“I was kind of, like, I daren’t think about theatre, because that’s too terrifying,” she says. “But whenever I worked in Ireland and was around other Irish actors, I was always so envious of how close they were, because they all knew each other through theatre. I thought I would love to get that camaraderie.”In Eureka Day, Dunne plays Suzanne, one of five school board members trying to navigate their way through a mumps outbreak.[ The Gate’s new season: Eureka Day, An Ideal Husband and Poor top the billOpens in new window ]“They’re all very highly educated people. They love a back and forth,” she says.Each character has a different take on vaccines, but the play – first performed in Berkeley in 2018 – is not strictly about vaccination.Anne has a breaking point, but she’s just very gentle. She genuinely wants the best for everyone. She wants the best for Amanda— Philippa Dunne“It’s about how people, through their own trauma, through their own viewpoints on the world, through their own position in the world, come to the decisions they make, and the consequences of that,” she says.“We can take life as black and white. It’s actually this big splodge of grey.”Dunne has relocated to Dublin for the run, though there will be “a little bit of commuting” back to southwest London, where she lives with her husband and their five-year-old daughter.She was in Dublin last summer to shoot Tall Tales & Murder, Stuart Carolan’s upcoming RTÉ-BBC screwball crime drama, and also the summer before that to make RTÉ family series Showkids.“I love getting back to Ireland, and that’s why, when the Gate approached me, I knew I really wanted to get back and perform to an Irish audience. I will always come back to Ireland for work, in a heartbeat.”Dunne, now 44, describes herself as being from both Dublin and Mayo, having been born in the capital to Dublin parents, before moving west when she was three.14/01/2026 - NEWS - Actor Philippa Dunne for the Magazine. Laura Slattery Interview. Photograph: Alan Betson / The Irish Times