Jade Byrne is a professional actor who has toured with Northern Stage Company, Company of Angels and Open Clasp Theatre Company. You’ll also know her from TV roles including those in Casualty, Inspector George Gently, The Dumping Ground and Mount Pleasant. She also has wonky-pancreas.
Jade is currently starting a run at the Edinburgh Fringe of her show Pricks which talks about the ups and downs of living with type 1 diabetes.
Your soaraway Shoot Up caught up with Jade for a typically harsh Shoot Up interrogation:
Shoot Up: Your acting career is no stranger to the medical world with an episode of Casualty to your credit. Who did you play in that episode?
Jade: I played Kelly Foster who was on a team building outward bounds trip and got her leg caught in a deer trap. Unfortunately they won’t be having me back, I died in the episode.
Shoot Up: The BBC once filmed an episode of Casualty in my parent’s house in Bristol in about 1995. The plot revolved around a transvestite falling down their stairs. Cool, huh?
Jade: Sounds like a standard Casualty storyline. I hope the transvestite survived the fall and their Casualty career didn’t come to an abrupt halt like mine. Ha ha! [Tim – they did; they were found by a deaf and dumb window cleaner (no, really) and rushed to hospital, where they reconciled their cross-dressing with their family]
Shoot Up: Anyway, enough about Casualty; you’re now doing your own show Pricks at the Edinburgh Fringe. Tell us all about it.
Jade: Pricks takes you on my journey of pricks, be that finger pricks, injections, cannula insertions or the other connotation of pricks. It’s about family really and coping with illness. It’ll make you laugh and quite possibly cry too. Apparently it’s really captivating and moving, which is lovely to hear.
Shoot Up: Your flyer says that you’re not bankrupting the NHS and you can eat a whole bloody cake if you want to. Do you feel there are a lot of misconceptions about type 1 out there?
Jade: Oh yes of course I do and that’s exactly why I’ve created Pricks to get rid of the ‘mis’. It annoys me that the media ;