SCHULL actress, Ayoola Smart, is to appear as Lady Chiltern in a production of An Ideal Husband at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

The four-act Oscar Wilde play about blackmail and politicalcorruption, as well as public and private honour, opens on May 8th and runs until July 11th.

Ayoola has enjoyed a great career including a role in Juliet Naked, a movie starring Ethan Hawke, Rose Byrne and Chris O’Dowd in 2017.

It was the first big career move for the Schull actress who was already a familiar face to TV audiences through her roles on Holby City and Vera. Ayoola, the daughter of Sally Smart, a theatre director and drama teacher who runs Smart Productions in Schull, has lived in West Cork since she was three years old. Her ambition to become an actress led her to relocate, at the age of 18, to London where she trained at the East 15 acting school, one of the top drama schools in the UK.

In 2020, Ayoola appeared on our screens as part of the multi-award-winning British spy thriller, Killing Eve, in which she shared screen time with another great Cork actress, Fiona Shaw.

Following her first appearance in that TV series, which was aired on BBC on April 12th 2020, a leading UK newspaper carried an article about the West Cork actress because viewers wanted to know: ‘Who is Ayoola Smart?’

Her many acting credits include roles in Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare’s Globe, The Lovely Bones, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew; and Les Misérables.

Ayoola went on to feature an episode of Death in Paradise, which is filmed in the Caribbean, as well as the Irish hit TV series Smother, and she had a big role in the surprise hit Cocaine Bear, a horror-comedy that was released in 2023 and is currently showing on the RTÉ player. Film fantasy viewers loved Ayoola’s performance as Aviendha in the Amazon Prime hit The Wheel of Time, which also featured Rosamund Pike in a lead role.

Filming for The Wheel of Time commenced in 2021 and Ayoola said it was both challenging and fun to play Aviendha, who is from a specific tribe of female warriors.Last year, Ayoola was delighted to be back threading the boards in a play at The Everyman. Part of what made it special is that the West Cork thriller, The Beacon, by Bafta-nominated Irish writer Nancy Harris, was based on an island like Sherkin. Despite having such a busy schedule, Ayoola tries to make it home for Schull’s Fastnet Film Festival every year.

‘I think it is brilliant to have such a wealth of creativity on our doorstep, in the town where I am from,’ she said. ‘It is lovely to be so immersed in film for days on end. It’s a very special festival,’ she said.