I’d been invited to be part of the National Youth Theatre’s production that year, which was Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. I was thrilled. Like everywhere in Ireland at the time, those of us in Leaving Cert in Clonmel all felt we’d be leaving the place when we graduated, going either to the UK or to college.

I had no big idea what I wanted to do. I’d always loved acting and theatre. In Clonmel in the ’80s we wouldn’t have had access to professional theatre. It would have been musicals that the local musical society did. I’d gone to Stratford-upon-Avon with my school to see the play we were doing for the Leaving Cert. And we’d also gone to Dublin to a Bernard Farrell play.

I’d done the National Youth Theatre auditions a month earlier. They said they’d let us know… So I shrieked and my mother came in from the kitchen and so did my younger sister Derbhile.

My father was a pharmacist in Clonmel. We lived above the shop and Derbhile went down to tell Dad. He came running up. He was a real theatre man and was thrilled for me. He thought it was a fantastic opportunity – he knew more than I did what it meant, to take part in a production with a professional director and design team, the top of the top of Irish theatre.

Clonmel at the time… it was the grey ’80s. This was like a door opening to a world of possibilities, something very different. I hadn’t been very worried about the Leaving Cert – I didn’t want to do Medicine, there wasn’t anything I really wanted to work for. But I knew now what I’d be doing for the summer. It took away a lot of the stress – after Leaving Cert wasn’t going to be blank spaces.

One of the difficulties going into the Leaving Cert is the uncertainty about what’s going to happen next. I had my ‘what next’ – I was going to Dublin for rehearsals and then performing in Dublin and in Limerick.

I’d done speech and drama from when I was a young child. It was my thing – and this was a real validation that this could be my thing. It gave me the feeling that my identity was kind of different. And not just that I thought I was good but that other people thought it too – there’s something about that external validation when you get chosen for something.

My mum sent the news into the local newspaper, The Nationalist, and it got in. I got slagged by my friends!

I got the part of Mary Warren, a great role. The Crucible is inspired by the Salem witch trials – Miller wrote it against the backdrop of McCarthyism. Mary was one of those testifying against the people accused of witchcraft. What I really liked about it – she has a personality very different to mine. She’s very timid and there’s a lot of range in the role.

I found I loved professional theatre, the process of rehearsal, performance, the transformational nature of theatre. I loved that Monica Frawley was the costume designer. We were all aged 17, 18, and 19 and we got bonnets that none of us were fond of, and grey dresses, very plain and simple, not at all flattering – a puritan 1700s look.

I remember a break in rehearsals one day and four or five of us went out to a phone box on Lombard Street. Witches and accusers all squeezed into the phone box, calling our mothers for our Leaving Cert results. I remember us laughing a lot – we were all so nervous – and an amount of screeching.

The performance that summer cemented my decision to go into live theatre, something I’d wanted but hadn’t articulated. Now I felt, ‘I can want this because they’ve chosen me.’

Working in theatre, you meet a huge amount of people. You get to know them much faster and probably more deeply than you would in an office scenario but relationships can be very transient – it’s a brief and intense thing. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

You rehearse the show, perform it, it’s gone. Theatre’s very ephemeral. A film of a play doesn’t really work. You put so much love, passion, energy and thought into it – and there’s nothing left but the posters, the costumes, a marked-up script.

But if you do something that works, it’s transformational – I think everybody remembers something they’ve been touched, or made laugh, by. There’s value in this. I prefer that my career has been a series of different experiences rather than being in one place for a long time. I think it suits my personality.

• Cliona Maher is artistic director at the multi-disciplinary Clonmel Junction Arts Festival, from June 28 to July 7. 
• https://www.junctionfestival.com