“I turned up in a full mesh bodysuit and a red lip with a slicked back ponytail.”
Rachel Galvo is recalling her first encounter with the Musical Theatre Society in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) back in 2018, when she showed up to auditions for the musical Chicago as a baby-faced first year student. Her bold style choices paid off and, despite being one of the only freshers in a sea of senior students at the auditions, Galvo landed the highly sought-after lead role of Velma Kelly.
Performance is in Galvo’s blood, with her love of storytelling going back to her early schooldays. “I used to do a one-woman cabaret in the corner of the yard at lunch. People [would] gather around and listen to stories I would tell,” she recalls. On meeting the rising star, it’s easy to understand why. Galvo has been blessed with the gift of the gab.
From South Dublin, Galvo made her West End debut in September – not in theatre, but in comedy. After studying global business at TCD, she followed her passion for performing and pursued a masters at Mountview, one of London’s leading drama schools.
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Galvo’s self-proclaimed “posh all-girls school upbringing” is the butt of most of her jokes. Her satirical posts on TikTok, coupled with relatable, honest content about topics such as mental health, body image and dating, have resonated with a large, mostly female audience.
Refreshingly candid and self-aware, Galvo takes her privilege and pokes fun at it with her show The Shite Feminist, which was written while she was still at college. Her show opens with an anecdote about developing the successful stand-up piece. In drama school, everyone was encouraged to choose a topic dear to their hearts to inspire their final show.
“People wrote about race and sexuality, growing up in poverty, all these hardships essentially that they have been through and are passionate about,” Galvo says. “Anyone can tell I have not been through many hardships, I’m a very privileged person.” And so The Shite Feminist was born.
“I think I wanted to highlight the fact that I was very privileged,” she says. “It’s very easy for me and other girls in my position to be like ‘We don’t need feminism. I’m working in JP Morgan and I have a college degree’ but I’m like, ‘it’s not all about you’. I’m a straight, white, middle-class woman, the only part there that is some sort of a disadvantage is that I’m a woman and not a straight white man.”
Entering what has traditionally been a male-dominated space hasn’t always been straightforward. Even now, the reaction to a female comic can be mixed. At Galvo’s show in Leicester Square Theatre, a milestone event for the comedian, she saw it first-hand.
“These four finance guys who I had met at my work friend’s event in London came along,” she says. “Twenty minutes before the end, one of them turned to his friend in the front row and was like ‘she’s actually kind of funny’. I called him out and we had a bit. But it’s like, what do you mean ‘she’s actually kind of funny’. I’ve sold over 5,000 tickets to comedy shows, what do you mean?”
Galvo has found herself subjected to some online trolls since growing a large following on TikTok. While most of the comments are water off a duck’s back, she has witnessed a more sinister side to the platform. “There is this ... culture of incels,” she says. “Men who not only hate to see women in equal positions in the workplace, but who find it even scarier when there’s a woman on stage with a microphone and there’s no one to talk over her or cut her off.”
For Galvo, it’s important not to sanitise her comedy for the comfort of those kinds of people. The historical tendency of women to lean towards self-deprecating humour was one subject Galvo delved into when writing her thesis. It’s something she still thinks about today as a performer. “The only way women would be funny was if they made fun of themselves, which is reinforcing the stereotype of us being below men on the hierarchy. I was just really passionate not to do that,” she says.
“At the beginning, when I did my first few shows, I was really scared to talk about the uncomfortable topics. I used to brush over them and be like, ‘Oh but not all men!’ and all this kind of stuff. But then I was like, ‘you know what, f**k that. I just have to own the space’. If I try to be more palatable then I’m not doing what I set out to do.”
She recommends everyone read Roxane Gay’s book Bad Feminist and They Used to Call Me Snow White by Gina Barreca, both of which she credits for inspiring The Shite Feminist. Asked if she could invite any six people to a dinner party, dead or alive, Galvo draws on her biggest inspirations, settling on Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sharon Horgan, Sally Rooney, Florence Welch, either Stephen Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber (she can’t choose), and of course her mother.
Strong presences all, and directional ones for Galvo in her career. “Going through each stage of my life, I started realising the times when we were treated differently because we were women,” she says. “We had a virgin society in our school and there was no virgin society in the boy’s schools.” From the most formative ages, she believes, a certain sense of shame and an instinct to make oneself smaller is instilled in young girls, something she reflects on in her stage shows.
I think there’s an assumption, at least among the people I grew up with, that you’re a performer because you can’t do anything else
“I wouldn’t send my girls to an all-girls school when I have kids,” she says. “I think being a teenager is really hard but I think that is exacerbated in an all-girls posh school where money comes into it,” she says.
Aside from the usual trials and tribulations of girlhood, Galvo found she struggled in school, only recently coming to understand why: “I have very bad ADHD,” she says. Galvo’s diagnosis last year helped her to make sense of herself. “I think people will probably roll their eyes and say that’s because TikTok is telling everyone they have everything. But I always knew there was something wrong with my attention.
“The lack of stimulation in school and sitting in a classroom for six hours a day, my brain used to go wild ... My brain is always going to work at 1,000 miles per hour, it’s just whether it’s focused on something good or something bad.”
Again, gender comes into it. “ADHD was a boy’s disease ... I was diagnosed with very bad anxiety at the age of 18 and I was like okay that feels right. But then it just continued through college and I started to recognise patterns in myself of when I’m really busy, I’m thriving.”
As well as posting her regular “South Dublin girlo” skits online, Galvo uses her platform on social media to speak openly about her mental health struggles. In one TikTok video she breaks down the stigma of taking anti-anxiety medication as a form of self-regulation, something Galvo has been doing for years. “People underestimate the power of mental health medication,” she says.
There were other barriers too. Despite spending the most treasured part of her education on stage (“I honestly feel that shows are how I measured my life, rather than school years”, she says), Galvo’s path to a career in entertainment has been far from straightforward. More than once, she describes caving in under the pressure to fit the mould expected from her growing up.
“I think there’s an assumption, at least among the people I grew up with, that you’re a performer because you can’t do anything else or because you’re not smart or intelligent. I resented that and wanted to show people I could still be intelligent and booksmart, even though I didn’t really enjoy it,” she says.
After completing a whirlwind scholarship programme at a Boston Broadway prep school in summer 2016, Galvo had got a taste for the big life. Studying for the Leaving Certificate was quite the comedown. With the full support of her family, Galvo started auditioning for stage schools, but when it eventually came to crunch time she let fear get the better of her, opting to study business instead of following her heart.
“In Christmas of sixth year, my mum said it was like I woke up one day and had a complete change of heart,” she says. “I think I was really scared of being judged. Dublin, even South Dublin, is such a concentrated bubble and everyone knows everyone. And I was just terrified at the thought of anyone laughing at me.”
These days, they are laughing, but for all the right reasons. Having recently brought The Shite Feminist show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, London’s Leicester Square Theatre and to several sold out dates in Dublin, it seems that Galvo’s comedy career is on the cusp of skyrocketing.
And Galvo has learned to harness her particular way of being to add fuel to future creative projects. “On my computer there’s always at least four Word docs open,” she says. “If I’m in a creative mindset, I’ll have four different thought processes happening at the same time and that’s when I’m thinking best.” With a new comedy show in the works, Galvo’s career direction seems assured – and she hopes more women will follow in her path.
[ Stand-up comedy: I never knew that five minutes could feel like a lifetimeOpens in new window ]
“I would tell any woman to try getting up and doing stand-up,” she says. “It’s so empowering, being on a stage in 10-inch pink heels with a microphone, speaking your opinion. And no one gets to interject.”
The Shite Feminist comes to Cork’s Cyprus Avenue on November 27th and 28th, followed by Galway’s Róisín Dubh on November 29th and 30th. Rachel Galvo’s Christmas Special is at the Ambassador Theatre in Dublin, from December 12th to 15th. See ticketmaster.ie
Three to watch: Comedians on the rise
Italian-Irish comedian Vittorio Angelone grew up in Belfast. Now based in London, where he previously moved to train as a classical musician before pivoting to stand-up, Angelone has rapidly risen through the ranks of the comedy world, amassing millions of views online with stand-up clips, podcasts and sketches. In 2022 he sold out his debut run at Edinburgh Fringe and was nominated for best newcomer at the prestigious Dave Comedy Awards. Angelone co-hosts a weekly podcast with fellow Irish comedian Mike Rice: Mike & Vittorio’s Guide to Parenting. Limited tickets for his extended 2024 UK and Ireland tour – Who Do You Think You Are? I am – are available for shows in Sligo, Westport, Galway, Dundalk and Kilkenny.
Shawn Uyosa is a Nigerian-born Irish comedian who has been performing stand-up comedy since he was 17 years old. Uyosa was crowned Ireland’s best new act at the Bray Comedy Festival in 2020 and The Comedy Cavern’s Cork comedian of the year in 2023. Selected to be in the regional showcase for the BBC’s New Comedy Awards in 2021 and 2022 and a Leinster finalist in RTÉ's Stand Up and Be Funny, this young comedian is one to watch.
Alison Spittle is an award-winning writer and comedian who can be heard on The Guilty Feminist and BBC Radio 4′s Grownup Land. London-born, but growing up mostly in Co Westmeath, her chatshow-style podcast The Alison Spittle Show has featured guests such as Sharon Horgan and Kevin McGahern. The comedian’s stand-up shows have enjoyed several sold out runs at the Edinburgh and Dublin fringe festivals and First Fortnight. She was a regular contributor to the RTÉ series Republic of Telly where she wrote and performed her own segment, A Guide to Mullingar. She’s currently doing a preview tour of her new show Fat Bitch in the UK.
