Double take

Success as a writer for stage and screen has almost eclipsed Mark O'Halloran's acting career – but it remains his first love and fuels everything he creates, writes SARA KEATING

ON THE morning of our interview, Mark O'Halloran arrives in the Gate Theatre's salubrious hospitality room sporting a thin moustache on his upper lip, a shiny black Adidas tracksuit top and impressively un-scuffed trainers. It is a look more reminiscent of the eponymous drug-dealers of his 2004 film Adam and Paul, I think, than the bohemian foppery of the Noel Coward play, Hay Fever, in which the actor and writer is currently appearing.

However, there’s nothing like a change of costume to enable a quick transformation and, as if reading my thoughts, O’Halloran starts stroking his whiskers. “I am trying to pretend it’s a hipster moustache,” he says, laughing, “and I think I can almost get away with it. But then I put on my bicycle helmet, and it all falls apart. A bicycle helmet and moustache just don’t go.”

O’Halloran is as relaxed in conversation as he seems with his facial disguise, despite the fact that he is expected in the final dress rehearsal in a few hours time before performing in front of a live audience in the evening for the first time in three years.

"I can't believe it's been three years," he says as he discusses first-night nerves. "After An Ideal Husband," (which he performed in at the Abbey Theatre in 2008), "I went travelling and I had some film work going on and then took some time to concentrate on writing. I didn't necessarily plan to do a play this year, but it was at the back of my mind that if I got the chance to go back on stage I probably should, because you always think as an actor that if you leave it too long you'll lose it; that you won't be able to get over the fear."

All actors suffer from their nerves, he says, even if they are only playing the part of a pork chop, one of the first roles he won after graduating from the Gaiety School of Acting in the early 1990s. “It was a very challenging and shocking part for me,” he jokes, “I’m vegetarian. It’s horrific,” he continues, “the first night fear. They have measured the adrenalin level of actors backstage and have found them to be the same as someone who has been in a serious car crash. But because of that, it is really addictive – it’s no accident that acting is probably the oldest profession in the world after prostitution.”

With recent lengthy absences from the stage, O'Halloran has almost become better known in the last decade for his parallel career as a writer, for the theatre, yes, but also for television ( Prosperity) and film ( Adam and Paul, Garage).

It was acting, however, that started him writing. “My real interest was in character, I suppose, and I learnt a lot just watching other actors in a rehearsal room, how they would become another person. But also through watching the actors themselves, I was learning about personalities, negotiating differences, figuring things out together. And I think it’s fair to say that my writing relies almost purely on this approach to a person. My plays and films tend to be about character, rather than plot.”

This is something you can certainly trace in the muted screenplay for Garage, which O'Halloran wrote for actor Pat Shortt in 2007, and in which the inner journey of Shortt's character, Josie, who has an intellectual disability, provides the momentum for the film, rather than any heavy, constructed plot. You can also see it in the tightly-focused single-perspective of the episodes of Prosperityand in Adam and Paul, a film that ambles through Dublin city following its eponymous drug-addict heroes in a haze of anti-dramatic action.

However, O'Halloran uses his play Trade, which will premiere as part of this year's Dublin Theatre Festival, as an example of how an idea grows for him from the starting point of character. "It's a short duologue," he says, "a sort of pure kind of dialogue, just two people in one room trying to find a connection. One's an older married man; the other's a young male prostitute. And it's about their relationship but also about the moral struggle that the scenario presents. The older man is married with a son the same age as this boy he has hired, and I suppose he's trying to discover whether it's possible to be a good person if your life is a lie."

O'Halloran knows pretty immediately, he reveals, whether an idea will be for a play or a film. "You visualise it entirely differently in your head. In the theatre the proscenium is always there in your mind – even if the play is being performed [as Tradewill be] in a site-specific location rather than on a stage. The language is heightened rather than naturalistic, and you have to pitch it at a different level, a more intimate level, I suppose."

However, the two different mediums do not just require two different approaches. They give O’Halloran two different roles to play. “In the theatre, especially in Ireland, the writer has a certain authority, but in film it’s a hire and fire thing, and I’ve been at both ends.”

But the greatest lesson that acting taught him about writing for both mediums, he says, is “how collaborative they both are. I just go in and play my part, whether that’s by turning up in a rehearsal room to answer any questions or by leaving everyone to do their thing.”

"Leaving everyone to do their thing" was not an option for O'Halloran when his screenplay for Adam and Paulwent into production in 2003. "I had no intention of being involved," he confesses, "but the actor who had been cast pulled out at the last minute and I was probably the skinniest actor in Ireland at the time, so I ended up doing it. It wasn't the easiest job and I didn't want to do it, but I think it worked out well."

Although it is probably the acting role he is best known for, he says that it isn't something he would seek out again. "I wouldn't deliberately write something for myself, I think. There's too much risk of your own personality getting stuck in there. Not that what you're writing is autobiographical, but it does have to be true. I mean, I have no personal experience of the world that Adam and Paulcame from but there are still moments in it that are very personal to me. There's that old saying 'write what you know' but I think it's more a case of 'write from what you know.'"

O’Halloran’s love of travel is constantly pushing him to expand the world he knows. Over the last three years he has spent time in Cuba, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and Albania, partly, he says, “because it is easy to be safe, to just repeat yourself, not to do anything different”. He doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed, either as an actor or a writer, he explains.

"I know people expected a sort of dour Irishness from me after Garageso instead I wrote a Cuban transvestite musical [currently in the financing stage], and that was deliberate, to shake myself up."

Cuban transvestites are about as far as you can get from Coward's comedy, Hay Fever, too, in which O'Halloran plays an urban fop being seduced by a young bohemian woman and then her mother. But it is perhaps not so far from Trade, which is in part inspired by the legacy of a repressed sexuality in Ireland. "But that's all changing now," O'Halloran concludes. "A whole era is coming to an end."

As a writer whose work has consistently reflected contemporary Irish life through the eyes of its social outcasts, O’Halloran is poised to document some of that change.

Hay Feveropens at the Gate Theatre tonight and runs until September 24th. Trade runs between September 28th and October 16th as part of the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival