‘I have loads of friends from drama school who have stopped acting. I think it’s a wise choice’

Ryan Donaldson, a rising star in the acting world, is sitting upstairs in the bar of the Abbey talking about talent and how far it can get you in his fickle industry. The 30-year-old actor from Northern Ireland, who has the lead role in the new Frank McGuinness retelling of Molière’s Tartuffe, believes talent is an “overused” word.

As a teenager at school in Lisburn, Donaldson won a scholarship to study drama at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). When I suggest his talent won him the scholarship, he bristles a bit. “I don’t know if I believe too much in that word,” he says. “It’s used to separate people to make them seem like they are special.”

Softly spoken and thoughtful, Donaldson is more interested in the other attributes an actor has to have to earn an ordinary living or indeed to make it big; we meet a few days after the objectively talented Paul Mescal got his first Oscar nomination. “You have to have grit, you have to have a dog in the fight,” Donaldson says. He puts more weight on his obsession with theatre than with talent. “I’m obsessed. I think about it a lot. And I spend a lot of my energy on it.”

There is no acting in his background. Like Taylor Swift, he grew up on a Christmas tree farm, which wasn’t entirely without drama. “It’s high stress, because all of your family’s income is reliant on one time of year. But my dad is a very relaxed person, he loves being outside. I still like to go home to help out.”

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He was introduced to drama by two secondary school teachers.” I just loved everything about it. I understood it in a way I still can’t quite articulate.” His teachers were the first people who noted his passion. “They saw a seriousness in me, they saw that I loved it, rather than thinking, ‘he’s really talented.’ They were the people who told me I could actually study drama after school.” That revelation changed everything.

At the time Donaldson was “massively” into rugby. His late grandfather Jim Donaldson had played for Ireland and was a hero for the teenager growing up. While he loved the game, he found the “toxic, masculine” culture less appealing. “I found it difficult to be around… I was always quite sensitive.” He brings this to his work. His strongest trait as an actor, he feels, is empathy. “Not all actors have empathy, but they should. Empathy and imagination. You can’t have one without the other.”

He remembers the day he told his grandad that he no longer had the heart for rugby. “I was really nervous,” he recalls. “I’d been doing all these plays, and missing rugby training. I told him, ‘I don’t think I want to do this anymore. I think I just want to go to drama club.’” He needn’t have been nervous. His grandad’s response was, “if you can find something to do that you love and eventually maybe do it as a job, you’ll be the luckiest person in the world.”

With his grandad’s blessing he did drama for GCSE and A Level, heading off to study at LAMDA in London at 18. After graduating he stayed on in the city, took a job in a bar in London and got his first acting job six months later, as part of the ensemble in Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward Theatre. While part of the ensemble, he was also understudy to the actor playing the lead role of Shakespeare, who, as it turned out, got sick a couple of times during the run. “So I had to go on. That was one of the scariest things I’d done at that point, but I had worked really hard and was prepared.” When the show was recast he won the role of Ned Alleyn.

A part in a Cheek by Jowl production of The Winter’s Tale followed, which toured all over the world. His time with Cheek by Jowl, headed by joint artistic director Declan Donnellan, has been formative. It was Donellan who gave him career advice he lives by: “Take the work seriously but don’t take yourself seriously. I still try to do that,” he says.

He’s been working steadily, with a few breaks, ever since. In 2017 there was a play with Druid, King of the Castle by Eugene McCabe. He’s had small roles for TV in The Huntsman and Killing Eve, and a more substantial part in RTÉ’s North Sea Connection. Last summer he played Edward in King Lear at the Globe Theatre which was, he says, “a dream”. The playwright Jimmy Murphy went to see him in Lear and subsequently cast him as Michael Collins in his play The Chief. His six-foot-one frame was a help.

He’s pretty despicable, he doesn’t have any redeeming qualities... he starts the play as a bastard and ends the play even more of a bastard. Which is a joy for an actor to play.

—  Ryan Donaldson on the character of Tartuffe

Tartuffe is not the first time he’s worked with Frank McGuinness or been on The Abbey stage. In 2016 he toured in McGuinness’s play Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, and became close to the playwright on that job. “He’s a beautiful, amazing man,” he says.

When Donaldson heard McGuinness was working on a version of Tartuffe for the Abbey he was tempted to get in touch with his friend, but resisted. “I’d rarely write to people asking to be considered, even when I’ve worked with them before, I’d just never feel good doing that,” he says. He was hopeful of an audition and when he got one, he felt the pressure. “When you really want the job, everything becomes much harder, the audition is harder,” he says.

He is clearly delighted to have landed the role. Tartuffe, which translates as The Impostor or The Hypocrite, is a darkly comic farce first performed in 1664. The play is a cautionary tale about an unscrupulous shyster who pretends to be virtuous and holy to worm his way into the household of wealthy Orgon.

Donaldson is in the middle of rehearsals when we meet and enjoying exploring the dastardly Tartuffe. “He’s pretty despicable, he doesn’t have any redeeming qualities,” he says of his character. “There’s no arc, he doesn’t go through this transcendent transformation… he starts the play as a bastard and ends the play even more of a bastard. Which is a joy for an actor to play. I’m not too worried about journeys and arcs. I’ve been in rehearsal rooms where actors are like, ‘I need to find out my arc.’ I’m not too concerned about that.”

He says the play, while set in the 17th century, occupies “a kind of mythic space which allows us more room to breathe”, and there are resonances, picked up on by McGuinness, with our social media-addled world.

Away from acting Donaldson is a keen cook – he was given a smoker for his 30th birthday – and is still emotionally invested in the family Christmas tree business. If he hasn’t got a job around November and December, he still goes back to the farm to help out.

“You find out quite a bit about people when you serve Christmas trees for two months in the freezing cold,” he says. Apparently, the people who pick lodgepole pines – bushy trees with branches that point upwards and long, candelabra-shaped needles – are the nicest. Unfortunately for them, his father has decided not to deal in them anymore because they are more difficult to grow. “Honestly, the customers that go for lodgepole pines were always lovely. Last Christmas, it was breaking my heart telling them we’re not doing them anymore.”

Thanks to his famously precarious profession, he doesn’t know whether or not he’ll be back selling Christmas trees this winter. Tartuffe will occupy him until the beginning of April and there is nothing else lined up afterwards. Does he worry about getting work? “If it gets to April and I’ve still nothing, then I’ll start to worry,” he says.

He has faith, though, and that potent mix of obsession and determination. A few years ago he reached a point in his career where he had to ask himself some hard questions. Would he keep striving, hoping that one day with luck and hard work he’d become one of the tiny percentage of actors who become “super successful”? And would he still want to keep going even if he always remained a jobbing actor who never made it big?

“There’s a point where you have to decide what you’re going to be,” he says. “And that point is when a lot of people stop, because why wouldn’t you? I have loads of friends from drama school, who I love deeply, who have stopped acting. I think it’s a brilliant choice, a wise choice”.

But it’s not his choice. Donaldson’s decision when he reached that crossroads was to keep going on his path, wherever it leads him. For now, it’s brought him to a starring role in the Abbey. A young man obsessed, in it for the long haul.

Tartuffe, a new version, by Frank McGuinness runs at The Abbey from March 3rd to April 8th