This July marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Donal McCann, the greatest actor I have seen on the Irish stage in over 50 years as a theatregoer. I am certainly not alone in singling out the unforgettable moments he brought to the stage as Frank Hardy in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, as Thomas Dunne in Sebastian Barry’s The Steward of Christendom and Captain Boyle in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock.
My first sight of him on a Dublin stage, long before he took possession of those three keynote roles, was playing another O’Casey character.
In 1966, as a 15-year-old schoolboy, I took myself to the newly-opened Abbey Theatre to see a production of The Plough and the Stars. I was hooked, not only by the language of O’Casey and his perspective on Irish history but also the young actor playing the Young Covey, spouting his socialist ideals as well as baiting and maligning the pious and cantankerous Uncle Peter in the play. McCann was then only 23 but in my memory he was more than a match for the older Abbey stalwarts in that production, including Harry Brogan, Kathleen Barrington, Angela Newman, Vincent Dowling, Philip O’Flynn and Aideen O’Kelly.
Of course greater things were to follow and I look back now and think how lucky and privileged I have been to see him in the three roles that always come to mind when his name is mentioned, three of the greatest performances – and outstanding texts – in the canon of Irish Theatre. While those performances stand apart and became part of theatrical lore and legend, other major roles in Irish drama received the inimitable McCann treatment, not least in Boucicault’s The Shaughraun, Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn, Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee, and Friel’s version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country, as well as as Tom Murphy’s A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant. One great personal regret I have is not to have seen his Estragon alongside Peter O’Toole’s Vladimir in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in the Abbey in 1969.
Ostentatiously discreet – Frank McNally on the French honours ribbon
The spirit of Dublin – Beatrice M Doran on distiller and lord mayor George Roe
A giant of the stage – Gerard Smyth on Donal McCann
Centre of excellence – Frank McNally on Irish literature’s most famous phrase and the rise of Gallic football
To say he was a great actor, or the pre-eminent one among his generation, seems inadequate. He transcended whatever greatness means and those of us who experienced his performances left the theatre knowing we had witnessed definitive interpretations of whatever character he embodied on the night.
A singular artist, and a fastidious one, he was indeed “King of all Kings among actors”, as Sebastian Barry has described him.
Long before today’s vogue for casting starry names in theatrical roles, his name on a theatre poster could draw audiences in very significant numbers. The playwright Hugh Leonard once said of him that he “. . . could make a play of merit seem outstanding and a better-than-good play look like a masterpiece”. Leonard was right on both points.
McCann had something he might well have denied having: an aura that seemed poised between this and some other world.
He was an actor of the deep gaze and also, of course, the magnetic voice. In the melancholy of that life-worn voice could be heard the cadences of a lyric heart. He once said that the “actor’s job is to serve writing”. The writers he served were indeed fortunate in having their time and his coincide in the annals of Irish theatre. In his delivery of language, which always seemed compellingly intimate, he managed to evoke something beyond the words of the author.
His screen presence was equally potent, as the Italian director Bertolucci recognised when he cast him as an artist in Stealing Beauty, though he never achieved, or allowed himself to achieve, the kind of international reputation and recognition that more recent generations of Irish actors have attained. His television credits are extensive, including Trollope’s Palliser novels and James Plunkett’s Strumpet City, and his filmography adds up to a surprising 25 films.
The ephemeral moments of theatre can only live in the memory but in at least one film role his supreme talent is recorded for posterity. His haunting portrayal of Gabriel Conroy in John Huston’s version of The Dead contributed greatly to that film’s status as a perfect work of art. There were other films that he enriched with his genius, including a soulful film version of the Sam Hanna Bell’s novel The December Bride, but the stage was his natural habitat and provided the sustenance he needed as an artist.
When he died at age of 56 in 1999, only four years after his astonishing portrayal of Thomas Dunne in The Steward of Christendom, he had by no means exhausted his art.
And though he would probably have been dismissive of such a suggestion, he surely deserves a place in the gallery of portraits that hang in our National Theatre – the cradle in which his sui generis talent was first revealed.