Bríd Brennan: ‘From childhood you’re trying to tell the story of who you are’

In the hours before the Irish premiere of My Sailor, My Love, her new film, Bríd Brennan is describing an early photograph of her father. “It was a little play they had written, in Irish, called the Fair Green of Ballinasloe,” the actor says. “He’s about 12 in the photo, with two other boys. The play was about King James escaping and being found in a barrel. So one is in a barrel with a paper hat, and another has a wonderful fedora and a knife and an intense look on his face. And that’s my father.” She laughs. “My father ran a wonderful pub at the dock gates of Belfast, with lots of traditional music and performance. He used to say, ‘Sure, I’ve been acting all my life behind the bar.’”

Having emerged from Queen’s University with a degree in English and French, Brennan applied for drama college in London. A few auditions later she went to Edinburgh Festival Fringe in a production of the Death of Private Kowalski with National Student Theatre. It all felt very precarious. “It felt like an adventure, and that was good,” says Brennan. “And then, of course, it continues, and at some point you wake up and realise, oh, this is what I do for a living. I didn’t think of it as a career. I started out thinking I wanted to do lots of other things. I thought, let’s see how far I can go with this. And in recent years that early sense of adventure has returned.”

My Sailor, My Love, named best Irish film by Dublin Film Critics Circle at this year’s Dublin International Film Festival, is a nautically themed romance about a grumpy retired mariner, played by James Cosmo, and his housekeeper, Annie, played by Brennan. The initially mismatched couple grow closer, much to the chagrin of Howard’s weary daughter, Grace (played by Catherine Walker). Howard has not always been the best father to the overbearing and domestically troubled Grace; the arrival of Annie and her jolly family is a blended arrangement that arouses jealousy and hurt.

“The story is so relevant,” Brennan says, “because it reflects the way our lives are structured. It’s a universal thing. It applies right across the world. The writers are Finnish, but they live in Sweden. And when I first talked to them they said this could be set anywhere. How our lives are structured doesn’t allow us to look after people like we once did...

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“There are ideas of redemption without being trite. Nobody’s entirely evil. It’s just how they muddle along. There’s always good in people somewhere. Part of this story is that Grace is struggling. And there’s a distance between her and her father. She hires a housekeeper because she’s overworked, not bargaining on the fact that two lonely people might be drawn to one another.

“A big part of this film is people’s capacity to love. Love does not just belong to the young, as we know. So much of love is companionship and laughter. And I just loved playing opposite James Cosmo. He’s such a generous, funny human being and actor. He can make you laugh. That allowed us to develop the relationship in the script in a very free way.”

Working from a script by Jimmy Karlson and Kirsi Vikman, and beautifully shot by Robert Nordström on Achill Island, Klaus Härö’s English-language debut as a director is uniquely Irish in its setting. It’s hard to think of another production that makes such pleasing use of sky greys.

This Irish coproduction’s superb location was a sort of homecoming for Brennan, who played Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World on Inis Meáin – one of the islands John Millington Synge visited – in the middle of a force-nine gale on a converted trawler.

“I fell in love with Achill a long time ago, doing a BBC-RTÉ production called The Ballroom of Romance,” Brennan says. “They put us up in Achill for two or three weeks during filming in Ballycroy. The night before I was due to be picked up I thought, I’m not going back: I’ll find something to do with myself here. And then Klaus, our director [on My Sailor, My Love], fell in love with Achill. He fell in love with that landscape. It’s the same landscape that Paul Henry, the painter, tore up his return ticket for. He spent 12 years there.”

Brennan’s career got off to a flying start with two indelible features by Pat Murphy. Maeve, a formally daring 1981 drama now regarded as a classic, was made against an extraordinarily volatile Belfast backdrop, a production during which Murphy says she was in fear the entire time. Maeve concerns a 20-year-old emigre (played by Mary Jackson) returning from London to Belfast, where various exchanges with friends and family, including her younger sister Roísín (Brennan), outline everyday imperialism that shows “men’s relationship to women is just like England’s relationship to Ireland’”.

“Pat was a trailblazer,” says Brennan. “I knew at the time I was absolutely thrilled to be part of something like that. At the time there was war in the streets. It was difficult to get the go-ahead, to go out on the streets and make that film. We needed the co-operation of people who knew how to handle things. And when I finally saw it, it was such an intelligent film that it really showed how things really were.”

Murphy and Brennan would collaborate again on Anne Devlin; one of the best Irish films ever made, it depicts the dignified suffering of Robert Emmet’s revolutionary housekeeper during and after the United Irishmen’s ill-starred insurrection. “The last time I was in Dublin before lockdown they showed a cleaned-up version of Anne Devlin,” says Brennan. “And it was packed. There was a group of women from a history group in the Liberties, and when Anne Devlin was described as a forgotten figure in history they said, ‘We haven’t forgotten.’”

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Brennan has been nominated for three Olivier Awards, for Rutherford and Son (1995), The Little Foxes (2002) and the Ferryman (2018). She has essayed Sister Aloysius in Doubt, Maisie in Juno and the Paycock, and Lady Macbeth for the Royal Shakespeare Company. But she remains particularly wedded to her performance as Agnes in Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa, a role she originated and for which she won the 1992 Tony Award for best featured actress in a play, before reprising her turn opposite Meryl Streep in the 1998 big-screen adaptation.

“It’s quite difficult to do a part like that: the quiet person,” says Brennan “I’m drawn to that. People with a lot of passion inside who are sitting on it. It’s hard to get that across on stage. But the real masterstroke of that play is the dance, when these women express themselves freely.

“When I finished that role in New York it was two years since we had started in the Abbey. I stayed on for an extra month. A couple of weeks later I went to see the takeover cast, thinking, this is great: it’s been such an adventure. But as I walked along the street my legs turned to jelly. And when I sat down and the music started, I thought, oh, you’re not getting rid of that so easily. Brian’s language is so fantastic; it just inhabits you.”

Brennan remains a key figure in Northern Irish culture, having featured alongside Kenneth Branagh in the 1980s Billy trilogy of plays, in Mike Leigh’s television film Four Days in July and, more recently, in the political thriller Shadowdancer, alongside Clive Owen. “From childhood you’re trying to tell the story of who you are,” she says. “And Belfast is a big part of that.”

My Sailor, My Love opens on Friday, March 10th