Trinity Graduate Louise O’Neill is set to have her award-winning novel Asking For It adapted to the stage. The novel is also to be adapted for the small screen after the London-based Landmark Productions company bought the television rights for it in April last year. The play is co-sponsored by the Abbey Theatre.
The world premiere of Asking For It is to take place at the Everyman Theatre during the Cork Midsummer Festival in June 2018.
In an interview given to the Cork Midsummer Festival on Thursday, O’Neill is looking forward to see how her acclaimed novel is to be adapted to the stage: “I believe that art is not just a mirror, showing us our true selves, but it has the ability to shape the way in which we see ourselves, that it has the power to transform the world that we live in. Culture can change culture. I am truly eager to see what sort of change a theatrical adaptation of Asking For It could enact.”
The director of the planned adaptation, Annabelle Comyn, who also gave an interview, spoke of the novel’s message: “When I read Asking For It by Louise O’Neill it was like a punch to the stomach. I want my daughter, and her friends, and this next generation to be informed, made aware, and enabled and encouraged to speak openly about an important, complex and tricky and at times deeply divisive subject. Let it be controversial; let us look at ourselves.”
O’Neill graduated from Trinity with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in English Studies in 2009 and has presented a television special for RTÉ’s “Reality Bites” series which explored attitudes towards sexual consent in Ireland.
O’Neill was also a guest speaker at a debate hosted by Trinity’s University Philosophical Society in January of 2016 and spoke in opposition to the motion ‘This House Would Use Its Sexuality to Get Ahead’.
