"I'm at the point now when I recognise the value of text. It can give you all the clues you need. McDonagh calls my character `Slippy Helen' - she's hard to hold onto. She's a bar of soap, but you can't play that. She's a fish - not a dolphin, not a sperm whale, she's sharklike."
Aisling O'Sullivan is making for me across the table like Jaws. "A shark gives you absolute attention and then goes off" (she veers towards a fellow diner) "and if there's blood in the water, God help you, she's quite viciously intelligent."
O'Sullivan's intelligence has power and energy - she just has to add viciousness to create that of Helen, the teasing village beauty in Martin McDonagh's The Cripple Of Inishmaan, which opens tonight at the Cork Opera House and comes to Dublin next week. She is a tall, straight-backed Kerrywoman with deep blue eyes, who immediately attracts the attention of everyone in the Galway coffee bar in which we meet; and for these reasons, there is a fin in the water as we sit down, which will speed towards us if O'Sullivan suspects this is a celebrity-style interview. The woman from the Royal National Theatre has murmured to me that I shouldn't ask O'Sullivan about her background or her family. Once O'Sullivan has relaxed, she translates the warning as meaning simply that she is not interested in wasting time doing an interview in which she is not taken seriously as an actress. There is no dark mystery about her family: "My mother's a nurse, my father's a teacher."
O'Sullivan (28) is one of the most successful young Irish actresses around. For London theatre-going audiences, she is increasingly the female face of the young Ireland, a position she won with her magnificent Pegeen Mike in The Playboy Of The Western World at the Almeida two years ago, holds now with Helen in Mc Donagh's Cripple, and will continue to hold in November, with her leading part in Frank Mc Guinness's new play, Mutabilities, again at the National. Other roles have included that of Masha in The Seagull, which went on tour around England, and that of Freud's Anima in Terry Johnson's Hysteria, at the Royal Court.
Her ascent has been perfectly perpendicular since she filled a place which someone else couldn't take up at the Gaiety School of Acting seven years ago. Garry Hynes, nurse of much talent, took her on a contract at the Abbey, and there, as well as creating a long, gaunt, memorable Maeve in Tom Murphy's Famine, she gave voice to some of the best dialogue about human relationships in modern Irish theatre, as Nuala in Billy Roche's Cavalcaders. Who can forget the moment when, love-struck by an older man, she asks what his ex-wife was like, and is responded to, gently and wisely by an older claimant of his love, played by Marie Mullen: "She was a little bit like me. And a little bit like you"?
Who can remember her bit part as the woman screaming in the bed when her lover is taken from her by Collins's men in Michael Collins? Quite a few can, actually, and from this she went on to be cast as the Mother in Jordan's next film, The Butcher Boy: "He asked me to age up. I decided to spend a few months drinking hard and smoking myself senseless."
Her relationship with her roles is, in fact, intense: "The part in The Cavalcaders was the first big serious part,["] she says. ["]You can hypnotise yourself on stage - if the play is well-written - it's like you're mesmerised by a script. I remember meeting people afterwards and you felt life had come full circle: you understood them, and they you."
It was with Pegeen Mike, she says, that "technique started to rear its head. You have to respond to text and cast. You have to have a craft to support you, not just blind inspiration. An intelligence about words and how to use them effectively. You have to understand how a writer works, so you can communicate his work effectively. There are levels of excellence which can be worked for." Working as a film actress, she describes as "more subtle, but you have less control: Neil Jordan is very easy to work for. He trusts his actors an awful lot."
So what of Martin Mc Donagh, and her own character, a hammerhead version of Pegeen Mike, whose frustration leads her to lines like: "I do like breaking eggs on fellas"?
"It's heightened realism", says O'Sullivan. "It's about small communities, people trapped in small places. I think he's spotted something really precise about the Irish. I think it goes back to the Famine. We've developed our own personality as a race. There's sharp humour and huge generosity, and he has got into the thing about laughing behind people's backs. There's huge warmth to Helen. She'll tell you to f--k off to your face. I like that." When Cripple Billy accuses Helen of "intimating" that his parents committed double suicide rather than be stuck with a defective child, she replies: "I wasn't intimating at all. I was saying it outright."
In Mutabilities she plays the mythic character of the File, who moves between the camps of Shakespeare and Spenser when they meet by chance during the Munster wars: "It's like a map of where we are and how we got there," she says. "It's probably why I'm going on so much about the Famine and ancestors. My aim is to refine myself a bit more in terms of my ability with text. I'll go home now and read the script and read other plays and make links and try to make a piece of art, not be a piece of art." As far as future roles go, she says, "I don't mind as long as it's things that feed the soul." Acting is a vocation which came to her from nowhere - except that growing up in an isolated area outside Killorglin, with no neighbours and no outside influences, she and her brother retreated to "our own little world" and made up radio plays. But she waitressed her way around the world and was selling life insurance in London when the call was clearly heard. Not that there was no link between selling insurance and acting: "I was a complete stranger and they signed things and handed over their money! And I was living in a bedsit with four people and hadn't enough money to live!"
She defines the need to act as stemming from the ability to stand outside yourself, and then changes tack: "I think it's more philosophical than that. I became aware of my own mortality. This short space of time I had . . . I've never been able to explain it properly, it's like . . . The need to understand what this is all about. It goes beyond sitting down at a yellow table with a cappuccino . . . Dare I say, spirituality . . . a profound sense of ancestry and ghosts . . . the magic being something you can't understand . . . And that's why people are doctors, nurses, writers, whatever . . . "
The Cripple of Inishmaan opens tonight at the Cork Opera House and next Monday at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin.
