First Encounters

Bush Moukarzel and Mark O'Halloran

MARK O’HALLORAN is a writer/actor from Ennis, Co Clare, whose works include screenplays for films Adam Paul and Garage. His show Trade was named best play of last year’s Dublin Theatre Festival in the Irish Times Theatre Awards. In this year’s festival, O’Halloran will appear in an adaptation of Joyce’s Dubliners at the Gaiety Theatre from September 26th-30th

‘IT’S ABOUT FOUR or five years since Bush and I met. I’d heard his name around town and you can’t really ignore a name like Bush Moukarzel. Then there was his extraordinary background – Bush being of Lebanese extraction and public school-educated in Britain. Also he worked with Pan Pan theatre company. They have a mysterious aura about them, they’re like a fabulous cult, very cool. My friend Andrew Bennett was working with them and they were talking about Bush.

“Then I met him in the pub. I live in the same complex of apartments as Andrew does, and Smyth’s on Haddington Road is our local. It’s the best pub in Dublin, home-from-home if you need it. That was in the days when I still drank. Bush used to come in with Andrew and we got talking. He’s a great intellectual fellow, fabulously well-read and he has great opinions about things. At the start I might have thought he was full of crap but he actually wasn’t. I was just jealous because he had read all these books and I hadn’t. I think his love of Joyce and Beckett brought him here – his love of Beckett is intense. He’s a very serious chap, which always makes me laugh, I’m probably not as serious as that.

“He had seen Adam Paul and Garage and liked them a lot. He talked about those quite effusively, which is always nice. I genuinely admire his brain and his breadth of knowledge is impressive for someone who’s comparatively young. He’s also quite funny in his dour, semidepressed serious outlook on life and it makes me laugh. It jibes with my own outlook on life, the hopelessness of it all.

“Now he’s got his own show about Proust: it’s got great ambition and great intellectual rigour to it. I talked to him about it. He likes to talk things through and if possible I would help him. I’ve great respect for him as a writer and a performer.

“I try to keep both writing and acting going, to keep it 50/50. I love the camaraderie of the rehearsal room, the idea of coming together as a group, the fun of it and also stepping out in front of an audience, which is both terrifying and joyous at the same time. Writing tends to be more withdrawn, lonely. You isolate yourself a lot more.

“I’ve never worked with Bush, it’s probably what saved our friendship, there’s no clash of egos. The friendship is based on a genuine interest in ideas, in what writing and acting can be. But writing-wise we’d have very different tastes. He’s very discerning whereas I tend to like things that are very broadly funny – I’m all for fart gags.

“I’m busy, I like to work, but there is time for friends. I often just bump into Bush as I’m wandering around bookshops in town. Then we head off for coffee and talk books.”

BUSH MOUKARZEL is an actor/writer who has worked with theatre companies Pan Pan, Rough Magic and Druid. TV credits include BBC’s When Harvey Met Bob and new period drama Ripperstreet. Originally from London, he lives in Dublin. Moukarzel will be in the final two performances of his one-man play, Souvenir, today in The New Theatre, Temple Bar, Dublin (3.30pm, 6pm)

‘I WAS A FAN of Mark’s before I became a friend. I had seen his films and thought Garage especially was a masterpiece. So I decided to stalk him. I knew he lived in my neighbourhood and was a friend of friends. I took up drinking and eventually made it into the snug of Smyth’s pub, which is a bit of an actors’ local.

“Mark’s quite a brilliant person, very funny. There was quite a big group of actors there, firing off each other, so I was pushed to mute, was often a happy audience member. But the intimidation was all in my head because Mark is so warm. I didn’t have to hide my admiration – he likes a bit of praise – so you could quite openly say, ‘I think you’re brilliant,’ which was helpful when it came to the show I’m working on now. I was able to say, ‘Mark, you’re a great writer, help me to make this one I’ve written better please.’ He was very kind and met me for a couple of sessions.

“It’s remarkable how theatre people here are helpful to each other. It’s pure generosity, support and enthusiasm. It’s not that people are lovely here and backstabbing opportunistic bastards everywhere else, I’m not sure what it is. But for example, the Edinburgh Fringe is a very competitive environment. I’ve been involved in the Dublin Theatre Festival and now in the Absolut Fringe this year and found it’s definitely an environment of support.

“In the arc of my friendship with Mark – from admiration to friendship – I’m trying to make it back to admiration. When you’re friends with people you admire, you somehow can’t ask them with a straight face to help you with your writing. You can go for a pint, or catch a film, the friendship has taken over. I’ve tried with Mark to ruin our friendship a bit by asking for advice. Mark is absolutely honest, honesty comes easily to him: he was very helpful, straightforward and unsentimental in his advice to me.

“The starting point of my show Souvenir, inspired by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, is intellectual, it was like an audio-book. Mark and others helped me push it into a live theatre performance.

“I’m a Londoner born and raised. My mother’s English, my father, who died when I was young, was Lebanese, hence the name, Bashir Moukarzel.

“After Eton, I studied philosophy at Nottingham and came to Trinity to do a Master’s in psychoanalysis. I was obsessed with Beckett and was always involved in drama at university. The psychoanalysis was an

attempt to get serious. But I joined Players in Trinity, and since then worked with Pan Pan theatre company. I’m also involved in a new BBC series, Ripperstreet, a new series of ITV’s Foyle’s War as well as in TG4’s An Crisis Eile, as a token Englishman, which I’m happy to be.

“But Dublin is definitely home, I’ll stay here as long as I’m allowed.”

In conversation with FRANCES O'ROURKE