Brendan Conroy's expressions and movements invoke memories of the many parts he has played over the years. He talks to Ian Kilroy aboutasserting theatre in Ireland
The is that individual look: something that suggests the English actor John Hurt, but an Irish version, with a mischievous glint in the eye. And then there's the physique: wiry and energetic, as much made to play the trickster Myles na Gopaleen as a more serious Murphy role, full of slyness and latent aggression.
Like any actor who's made an impression, when you meet Brendan Conroy, he carries into the room an air of the parts you've seen him play. It's like a vague complexity to his presence, a gesture here that evokes one of his incarnations on the stage, an intonation there that takes you back to some production he was in, years previously. The man himself may be nothing like the impression he makes, and yet you cannot help but see him through the fictional personas he conjures for a living.
To many Irish people, Conroy will forever be Peter Cadogan, that folksy Irish peasant to Peter Bowles's aristocrat in The Irish R.M. That role, and appearances on television throughout the 1980s, in productions such as Bracken, The Ballroom of Romance and Glenroe, have made Conroy a constant presence in Irish life. The 1990s brought work in The General, The Butcher Boy and Ros na Rún, but it is as a theatre actor that he has done his finest work to date.
That interest in theatre, explains Conroy, started early in Tuam, where he was born in 1950. "I would have known the Tuam Theatre Guild. My mother would have brought me to plays in Glenamaddy. I'd have seen John B. Keane's Sive coming home from boarding school . . . and, of course, the kind of people that Murphy wrote about were still living in the Tuam I grew up in."
After boarding school came UCD, where the drama society proved of more interest to Conroy than the academic courses in English, history and philosophy he was taking between 1969 and 1972. With his sailor father living in the US and his mother working in England, and with very few close relatives in Dublin, Dramsoc provided a kind of surrogate family for Conroy.
"The kind of family that Dramsoc sets up when you're doing plays, the kind of support system that it offers, that was my saving grace really," says Conroy, remembering the "isolation, the bedsits, the banana sandwiches and boiled eggs of student life". Despite years teaching in Spain and France after college, where he started a family, acting remained a constant. He returned with his partner at the time to Dublin, where they started Pintsize, a puppet theatre company based in Parnell Square.
"We used to make puppets and little stories and all that kind of stuff. We used to go around on a bicycle with a little trolley behind . . . and sometimes we went to schools." It wasn't long, however, until he went it alone, finding his first major theatrical success in Borstal Boy, with old Dramsoc colleague Jim Sheridan in the title role. It was that production which got him his Equity card. "From then," says Conroy, "acting became a sort of other life for me."
Speaking to Conroy, you can't help but be struck by his lack of conventional ambition. It isn't that he doesn't live and breathe acting - he does - it's just that his measure of success is not to have his name in lights in Broadway or the West End.
As with his current role as Jack in Our Lady of Sligo, his allegiance has always been to the Irish stage, particularly to the Irish regional stage. Despite playing opposite Anthony Hopkins, Mel Gibson and Daniel Day-Lewis in The Bounty, an international career never seemed to appeal all that much to Conroy. In that way, he is not provincial, as professionally he does not look overseas for affirmation.
"I'd like the things that go on in Ireland to have their own value and their own status, rather than them having to be asserted in either London or New York. I'd like the theatre community to say that it is so massively important for theatre to be good here. I think that people like Jim Nolan and Garry Hynes have asserted that over the years. They were great people for asserting the theatre in Ireland, in their own hometowns." His close association with Jim Nolan and Red Kettle Theatre Company over the years is symptomatic of his commitment to Irish regional theatre. Conroy's has been a career forged with companies such as Druid in Galway and Island in Limerick. Currently in rehearsal in another regional theatre with Sebastian Barry's Our Lady of Sligo, which opens next week in the Town Hall Theatre in Galway - the play's first full Irish production - Conroy explains that he has a special relationship with Barry's text.
"The main character in Our Lady of Sligo, Mai, was born in 1900, and my mother was born in 1911. My mother did commerce in UCG, and Mai went to UCG. My mother married a sailor, and Mai married a member of the British merchant navy. There are an awful lot of echoes in the play for me," says Conroy.
Set in Jervis Street Hospital in Dublin, the play tells the story of Mai O'Hara's destructive relationship with her husband, Jack, played by Conroy. As much a play about intimate relationships as of the 1950s Ireland in which it is set, Conroy says Barry "gives an extraordinary emotional life to his characters". In the case of Our Lady of Sligo, those characters, says Conroy, "had the skills to dream and to hope, but once they got disappointed, that disappointment stayed with them".
Quite self-effacing, Conroy says that he has concentrated on the regional stage because he has not generally got major parts in Dublin productions: "I wouldn't get the kind of great parts in Dublin that I got elsewhere, I just wouldn't get them.
"There's a lot of concentrated talent in Dublin and I don't think all the theatres can absorb all the actors." The kind of great roles he's talking about are Manus in Friel's Translations, Griffin in Nolan's Moonshine, and Matt Talbot in Kilroy's Talbot's Box - all parts Conroy has made memorably his own. Yet anyone who saw his Jimmy Jack in the Abbey's 2001 production of Translations - which toured to New Haven, Prague, Budapest and Barcelona - will know Conroy as an actor of national standing. Touring with the Abbey in The Field to the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1980s, and more recently appearing in a successful production of The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in New York, Conroy's is a career that has reached much further than he gives himself credit for. And now with his son Ruaidhri (Into the West) and daughter Nelly (Family) also in the business, it looks as though Conroy, now a 51-year-old grandfather, has a legacy that is going to stretch at least into the next generation.
"Yes," says Conroy speaking of his children, "they're a great support to me . . . and in this business you need people around you to support and encourage, so that you can have the energy to keep starting again and again. This business is like snakes and ladders, you see. With each and every job, you start at the bottom, all over again."
The Town Hall Theatre, Galway, production of Our Lady of Sligo by Sebastian Barry is directed by Ian Rowlands and stars Fedelma Cullen, Brendan Conroy, Emma McIvor, Ann Marie Horan and Maire Stafford. It opens at the Town Hall Theatre on Thursday, and tours to the Pavillion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire (August 27th to 31st); Hawks Well Theatre, Sligo (September 2nd to 7th); the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick (September 10th to 14th).
