‘For what I pay for my room in Dublin, I had an apartment with a big balcony in Paris’

When Morgan Savidan moved to Dublin to study in 2021 she couldn’t find accommodation and had to live in an eight-bed mixed hostel dormitory for a month. “Women were paying extra to be in the women’s dorms, but I just couldn’t afford it.” While she looked for a longer-term rental, she slept in a bunk bed in a room with seven men in a hostel in the city centre. “It was ridiculous. Everyone on the course was worried for me, obviously. My parents were freaking out.”
Privacy was hard to find, but “guys in the room gave me their extra bed sheets” to rig up a screen around her bunk, “which I thought was so lovely. So I was in my little cocoon.” One roommate, a Moroccan working here, with a daughter her age at home, looked out for her. He would leave an apple for her in the morning.
Savidan, a French-Indonesian actor and theatre-maker, had moved from her family home in Paris for a two-year course at Gaiety School of Acting. There were surreal moments. “I was practising my tap-dance routines in a hostel room with seven people, at 1am. People were like, ‘Excuse me, Can you just stop?’ And I was like, ‘I know, I’m so sorry. It’s just my dance teacher is going to kill me if I don’t know this routine by tomorrow.’ I need to apologise to those seven people, that I had to haunt their dreams with my tap.”
But it wasn’t all apples and dancing in the hostel. “It was grim. There were police raids.” (She doesn’t know why). Plus, she says, the price of a bed doubled at weekends, and some other long-termers left at weekends to camp, because of the price surge.
Savidan, now 26, was born in Surabaya, Indonesia, then spent most of her life in Singapore, before moving to Paris for six years. Her mother is Indonesian, her father French, and English was their language in common; she and her brothers mixed all three languages at home. She started training as an actor in Paris and moved to Dublin as training in English felt more comfortable. “With acting being so vulnerable and emotional, 20 students thrown together, you bond very quickly, very easily, very deeply. The people I met as soon as I got here are very dear, dear people to me. I live with four of them, in a house of actors.”
A room share had opened up in a classmate’s place in Inchicore. Gradually others in the class moved in. “We’re starting a cult!” she jokes. It’s a happy home. All the same, “it’s cold and mouldy”. Rent is per room. “People think it’s quite a good price for Dublin. But for the exact same as I pay for my room, I had a 30sq m apartment with a big balcony in Paris. I definitely did not expect Dublin to be so expensive for housing.”
In a class of Irish and international students, two were mixed-race, and Savidan and Indian-Irish friend Sasha Carberry Sharma from Belfast “bonded through that”. Together they have written and perform in their show Beasts, coming to Dublin Fringe Festival. It’s about two mixed-race girls struggling to find their place and going on a trip. As their adventure unravels, they explore “where they think they belong, what the concept of home is, when it’s just a memory. Whether it’s just a stamp on your passport,” or where your parents are from. “We also explore sexualisation of Asian women through time and in colonialism.”
[ ‘I found it quite easy to make friends, because Irish people are open and polite’Opens in new window ]
“The house I live in right now, with all these actors, we have our own family. I have my own community here that I feel at ease with. It’s a very welcoming country. Despite things that have happened here recently, I feel quite safe and welcome. I can’t ignore, obviously, certain right-wing movements that have happened, but it’s still a lot safer than where I was in Paris, and I get a lot less hate, less comments. I feel at home. There’s a lot more people that step up to help you here than there are people to bring you down.”
One of her first nights out in Dublin, alone near Grafton Street waiting to meet a friend, a stag-group started hassling her. “Then another group of Irish men walked by, in the opposite direction. They saw what happened and came and pretended they knew me, and told the others to f*** off. They were, ‘Are you good?’ Yep. And then they just left. That’s the first time someone has helped me, and not then tried to make a move. They just went on their merry way.” She’s thankful to be able to “just go about my day, and that’s the norm here”.
The night of last November’s riots, she was working at a bar on Capel Street until 2am, and was scared going home. She couldn’t find a cab and walked down to the quays. “I saw a group of people walk by and I hid next to the dumpsters, just in case.” They stopped, a mixed group of locals. One of the young women came over alone to Savidan and said, “Hi, we just saw you. Are you okay? Do you need help?” They all walked her to look for a cab, staying with her until she got one. “It was very sweet of them. They were like, ‘sorry for everything that happened. That doesn’t represent Ireland’. It was really reassuring. And living in Paris, I’m used to riots. They happen every Saturday. That’s the norm. Things burn. But no one comes up to reassure you. In Paris they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, half the country thinks like this. What are you going to do about it?’ You don’t feel that here.”
She hadn’t worked in a pub before. “I definitely threw myself into the deep end with that choice. Granted, when people drink, their thoughts aren’t as processed, as filtered. Maybe I look more of an outsider here than the norm, and would get certain comments and sometimes little racist or hurtful things said to me. In a lot of cases, they weren’t even meant in a mean way. It was more accidental, just ignorance, that I had to decide to ignore.”
[ ‘In Ireland, everyone’s grown up together and no one is really looking for new friends’Opens in new window ]
Making friends was “so easy. I guess it’s part of the culture to go out and have a drink and talk. People are very chatty here. I realised it was so easy to make friends and connections. The arts community here is so welcoming. I haven’t met anyone here that isn’t creative.” Her boyfriend is an Irish musician.
A trait she “picked up from the Irish” is to “try and see things for their best and stay positive always. It’s crazy in a country with weather like this, for people to be so happy, so open, so chatty. It’s easier when it’s sunny and you can just wear a shirt. You don’t have to wear 50 layers and more leggings! When it rains, I don’t want to leave the house, and people here are: ‘No, we’re still doing it. Our plans are not cancelled because there’s a storm outside, and nothing works, and the buses are not coming.’ No, people still push through. Definitely that’s something I took on. So I always see the best in things, and am excited for what’s gonna come next. Also it’s the people I surround myself with. I mean, in a house full of actors, you always have to have hope. It’s a job where your job is literally to look for a job.”
Beasts is at Smock Alley Black Box, September 17th-21st. fringefest.com