Mick Lally is a home-grown star, something which is rare in this country. The Liam Neesons, Gabriel Byrnes and the like tend to have made their reputations abroad, a sign perhaps of a lingering of the old attitude that nothing here can be really worthwhile until it has been endorsed somewhere else.
But Lally, who has worked little outside Ireland, is still the real article. When he comes into a room heads turn, if his name is on a poster it means full houses. He has been on the top rung of Irish theatre for years now, and yet he seems a most unlikely candidate for stardom. There is nothing glamorous about him. He still speaks in the soft rural accent of his native Mayo and his pleasant, lived-in face is not, he would admit himself, what you'd call especially handsome.
When we talk, he is in rehearsal for Patrick McCabe's own stage version of his novel The Dead School, a dark, comic tale of madness and mayhem in a national school in the 1950s. Lally plays Raphael Bell, a pedagogue of the old type, devoted to Faith, Language and Motherland, whose world is turned upside down by the arrival of a younger teacher. I suggest to him that as a boy, growing up in Tourmakeady in Mayo he must have gone to a somewhat similar school and, maybe, even encountered similar teachers, but he denies it.
"I'm a kind of a bad candidate for that," he says, "because I had a lovely national school teacher, not at all the image that has come down to us, which is of a pretty rough lot. He was a benign man and we remained good friends until he died about six months ago. In a sense he introduced me to my life now, because he used to do quite a number of plays with us. It's a Gaeltacht area and everything was done through Irish, so he did plays, partly for fun, but also as a means of promoting the language in the area and our ability to use it. It was great, because we got the chance to travel to other areas, places like Carna, where there were other schools doing the same thing."
How does he get into a role like this, then?
"Well, you call up what you've heard about teachers and know about them. I myself spent some years teaching (in a vocational school in Tuam) "though, again, there was no parallel. But you're aware of the classic image of the semi-mad teacher. You have him in Myles na Gopaleen's An Beal Bocht, going round hitting the kids with their books. And not so much the violent teacher, but the very focused one of the Ireland of the 1950s. Very nationalistic and heavy into the Irish language and Catholicism in a very narrow way. Of course there were many who were not like that at all, I'm sure, but you take the conventional image and mess around with it and come up with a photo-fit image."
The play has created huge advance interest and was almost sold out well before its opening last Tuesday at the Galway Festival, a fact that worried him faintly: "Because if, maybe, it doesn't work, or bits of it are unsatisfactory, by the end of the night you're going to have people saying: `Jaysus, what were we booking for?' "
Unsurprisingly, he's not a great worrier, however, not one of those actors of whom one hears who get sick from nerves in the wings or even have to give up live performance altogether. But he does agree that a certain amount of nerves are inevitable and necessary.
"Though it's surprising really. Because when you've done your preparations well, rationally there shouldn't be nerves. I do know an actor who says, very adamantly, that he never had a nerve in his life, because he'll have done his rehearsal work well and his other preparations well. So, as far as he's concerned, nothing can go wrong and, therefore, why have nerves?" He laughs. "I don't believe him. But I don't get it that bad. The previews and the first couple of nights can be desperate, though, so much so that sometimes you wonder: `God, why am I doing this?' " Well, why is he doing it? After all, with years of successful television behind him, and still continuing, he presumably doesn't need the badly paid work of the theatre any more?
"I've a huge impulse to keep the hand in with the stage. If a year went by in the summer months, when I'm free from Glenroe, without something coming up on the stage, I'd be really, really in the depths of depression. Thankfully, it's never happened yet."
He speaks appreciatively of the way Joe O'Byrne, the director of The Dead School, works. "He has an interesting manner of working. He approaches it as figurative, or maybe depictive, theatre. He uses masks and puppets and little things, like maybe the dropping of a hankerchief, small things that take on a symbolism as things progress. There's only six in the cast, me playing the older teacher and the others playing, well, nearly a million parts between animals and kids and inspectors and various things. I don't think it will be as bleak as the novel, which would be pretty difficult anyway."
The play is being produced by the Galway Arts Festival and Macnas, moving on from their street parades and big mythic shows into a different area of drama, as part of their tenancy of Galway's Black Box theatre. With so much happening in the arts in that city, it all seems a long way from 1975, when Mick Lally, with Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen, founded the now famous Druid company. Lally had left teaching at that stage and was involved with the Taidhbhearc, and any other acting jobs he could pick up. "The Taidhbheac turned out to be a pretty good learning ground," he says. "They used to bring down professional directors from Dublin, people like Alan Simpson, and I learned a lot from them and also from watching the older actors there. In those days we more or less picked it up as we went along."
In the summer small groups of actors and would-be actors used form to put on, mainly, Irish classics for tourists. One of them was Druid and its founders decided, at the end of the season, to try and stay together and to establish something more permanent. It was a courageous step in the dark and, as Lally says, "the main thing at first was not to die of hunger." Apart from a small stipend from Bord aile Failte there were no grants, though Lally is quick to point out that the Arts Council came in quickly when it became clear that work of quality was being done. "It was," he admits, in many ways a complete chance that it happened. Cause we were imbued with a spirit of adventure, we didn't countenance failure."
By degrees an audience was built up in the tiny 40-seat Fo'castle there, behind the Coachman's Hotel. People came back two and three times to see those early shows, but by and large they were a tiny coterie, many of them students. The general populace of Galway hadn't yet come along and, Lally says, tended to think: "Oh, they're doing very strange plays, them Druids, very quare plays indeed."
The breakthrough came with Tom Paine, by the American playwright Paul Foster, and provided an early example of Garry Hynes's now legendary tenacity. When Druid applied for the rights, Foster refused, saying he had no intention of dragging Ireland out of the Theatrical Ice Age. Hynes telephoned him at the university in America where he worked, only to find he was on lecture tour of Brazil. Lally says he still doesn't know how, but somehow she managed to track down his number in Brazil, rang it and came off the phone with the rights.
It was, by some way, the "quarest" play they'd yet done. Six people played a cast of hundreds, using all sorts of devices, including papier mache figures on a giant chessboard to simulate a war which, says Mick Lally "worked exceedingly well". For the first time the "house full" signs went up and Druid was up and running in that remarkable success story that reached its apotheosis earlier this year, when it conquered Broadway with The Beauty Queen Of Leenane by Martin McDonagh.
Lally was there when the production won a hat-full of Tony Awards last month - flown out as a guest of the company. "The New York thing has been the culmination of much," he says, "and while it's wonderful and great that it happened, still the main focus must always be on getting things done in Galway." He points out in a gentle fashion, for he's not a confrontational man, that the McDonagh play never evoked interest for a run from any of the main Dublin theatres, though it had toured Ireland after its London and Galway openings, had been to Australia and then to off-Broadway New York.
In 1977, after two years of hard slog with Druid, Lally decided to leave for Dublin. "Basically, I left for a change of air," he says. "I wanted to test myself in other waters." Work quickly followed at the Abbey and other theatres - he's probably been the most employed and employable actor in the country during his career, another testimony to his star quality.
But, of course, theatre has little to do with the making of stars today, it's television that has really made him the household name that he is. Louis Lentin, then head of drama in RTE, saw him at the Project Arts Centre in Eejits, a play about a folk group by the Belfast writer Ron Hutchinson ("whose writing in hindsight reminds me a lot of Martin McDonagh").
He was offered a part which he couldn't take because of stage commitments, then one in Roma, a play by Eugene McCabe. His acting in that won him a Jacob's Television Award, which led in turn to Bracken, a soap set in the west of Ireland, which in turn begat Glenroe, with some of the same characters. Since then, do what he will on stage (and he's played literally scores of parts) Mick Lally is forever tagged with the persona of the likeable but somewhat gormless Miley, a role he has now played for 15 years. Does he ever get sick of it?
"Sometimes, inevitably, but generally speaking, no. It's a very enjoyable series to work on and, as a cast, we get on exceedingly well together when we're working. We never socialise together, which is probably why. We work eight, nine months of the year on it, from August to April, and during the winter it's very handy to have. But the reason I think I've stayed with it so long is that I've always had the opportunity to keep in with the stage side of my life and do occasional bits and pieces in films as well."
Is the constant identification with the part he plays a trial?
"It can be, but the Irish aren't bad like that. For example, I go up and down on to the west quite a lot, visiting Galway or my folks in Mayo. Nobody ever bothers me, except maybe for the odd kid looking for an autograph. I think if you present an air of being inaccessible, you can make it more difficult for yourself. I think I present an air of: `When I'm here, you can say hello.' I think that helps. Sometimes there'd be the odd drunk or trouble maker. You'd be out on tour and they'd come up to you in the pub afterwards and try to tease you about Miley and the carrots, or something. But, even then, after a while, the conversation would turn to the fortunes of Manchester United, or whatever."
Does he foresee a time when Glenroe might come to an end? The prospect doesn't seem to worry him.
"I suppose everything comes to an end, but given the realpolitik of television nowadays, as long as people keep watching it in fairly decent numbers and the advertisers are filling the various slots, they'll keep it on. In years gone by they might have taken it off, but in RTE now, where every penny counts, I doubt if they'd take it off while it's fairly high in the TAMS."
In the unlikely event of something happening to Glenroe, it's highly unlikely he would be out of work for long. Film is another aspect of his career in which he's been in demand, which brings up the question of the need to adjust between stage and screen acting.
"Well, when I had my first encounter with the camera, back in the late 1970s - I was in Poitin, with Donal McCann, Stephen Rea and Cyril Cusack, directed by Bob Quinn - I found no need to adjust at all. We'd been in the Fo'castle for two years then, which was such a small theatre that basically one was doing screen acting. The twitch of an eye, if it was wrong, was instantly spotted there. Every performance you gave had to be reduced in scale and that's why working in front of the camera was painless."
Other film work he remembers with particular affection includes three pieces directed by Pat O'Connor, The Ballroom Of Romance, Fools Of Fortune and A Night In Tunisia, based on a Neil Jordan story, and he has a special regard for The Secret Of Roan Inish, filmed in Donegal four or five years ago by the cult American director, John Sayles.
But at the end of the day, as with so many actors, Mick Lally's heart seems to be first and foremost in the live theatre and it is this which has given him his warmest memories. Any particular favourites?
"Well Old Mahon in The Playboy was one, because he's an outrageously wonderful character and the Druid production was, I think, a very fine one. Also, among all the work I've done with Garry, The Wood Of The Whispering by M.J. Molloy and Tom Murphy's Famine. Then the first ever production of Friel's Translations stands out for many reasons. It was the birth of a new company, Field Day, in Derry and there was so much going on up there, including the hunger strikes. I'd my wife and my baby daughter there with me and here we were, a couple of Irish speakers, staying out in a place beyond the Waterside, where all the gables and traffic signs had UVF and UDA sprayed on them. We were a bit heedless, I suppose, too much unaware, but anyway nothing happened.
Like many an actor, Mick Lally is something of a cuckoo in the nest, with nothing of the theatre in his background. His parents still live on what he calls a "mountainy farm" in south Mayo and, as eldest son, he was offered the chance to take over the running of it. "They sent me a letter. You know, did the right thing," he says, smiling. "But I think they knew I'd never accept."
He remembers the first time his father saw him on the professional stage. "We were in the pub afterwards and he said: `God, I suppose it was all right. It was fairly good and you were fairly good.' High praise! And then he said: `Sure, it's all made up anyway."
He gives his baritone chuckle again: "I often think if I write my memoirs that'll be the title - It's All Made Up.
