In the Warwickshire town of Stratford-upon-Avon - home of the Royal Shakespeare Company - during the week after Easter, two topics dominated just about every conversation. It was not the usual fare of who's doing what, where, how, to what size of an audience and at the loss of how many lines. What everyone wanted to talk about was the great flood, which, only days before, had deposited 100,000 gallons of the muddy River Avon into the pit beneath the stage of the main house and turned the Waterside into a scene straight out of The Merchant of Venice - and, some would say, the Belfast Agreement.
Belfast actor Lalor Roddy is better placed than most to comment on both events. He watched with growing trepidation as the flood waters crept closer to the doorstep of his little weathered-brick riverside cottage and joined the large band of bailers-out, as RSC staff and company members worked around the clock to get this theatrical institution and major tourist attraction back to some kind of working order. And, while he may have been at a slight physical remove from the machinations of the Stormont wranglings, he knows and has experienced enough to acknowledge, with a characteristically wry Northern grin, both the climate back home and the level of interest and engagement pervading middle England.
"IT'S a big event, here", he concedes. "You're right, everyone wants to talk about it. Ah well, we'll wait and see". The shrug says it all. Roddy is, however, partly responsible for the wave of pro-Irish enthusiasm, currently causing excitement and highly-charged emotional ripples along the Avon. He is one of a cast of six actors - the others are Stella McCusker, Stephen Kennedy, Mairead McKinley, Aislinn Mangan and Owen Sharpe - who are packing the RSC's studio theatre, The Other Place, with John Crowley's Shadows, a thrilling first-time collective staging of Synge's Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen and Yeats's Purgatory. So inspired and life-affirming is Crowley's seamless fusion of the three, and so powerful the performances, that the sound of spontaneous weeping can be heard around the auditorium and audiences emerge, bursting to chat, not only about the theatrical experience but about the perceived relevance of these poignant plays about death to the present day situation in Ireland.
Not surprisingly, Roddy is delighted at the response: "The audiences have been amazing. The atmosphere has been absolutely electric on some nights. You could cut the emotion with a knife. We are a great team. The way John has structured and cast the three plays, everyone gets an equal share of the limelight and is totally supportive of everyone else. As far as my performances are concerned, I feel I have only touched them yet - and that particularly goes for the role of the old man in Purgatory. A year from now, I will still be trying to get a handle on it, but I'll be a lot closer than I am at the moment".
That, of course, is one of the advantages of a season at Stratford. An actor is given the time and the scope to come to as-near-as-absolute terms with a demanding character part. But there is, inevitably, a downside, too. While Roddy played a short season for the RSC at the Barbican in London - in the highly acclaimed roles of Humpy in Billy Roche's Amphibians, and the therapist in James Robson's King Baby - the full season at Stratford places him at a distance from home and from his children, seven-year old twins Bobby and Moya.
"I do miss being away from home and from my kids. They're spending a week here at the moment and it's magic to have them around me. But, there's no doubt that this is a great place to learn about theatre. I am in one of the best company of actors in the world and the discipline of learning your art here has few equals.
"The RSC is unique. It is quite institutional and very commercially orientated. It has 12 shows on the go at the moment and all 12 are regularly encompassed into three day blocks, so that the tourists can get round them all. If you're in more than one show or are rehearsing and performing at the same time, it is unbelievably hard work. I've worked a 15 hour day today, rehearsing Measure for Measure and doing Shadows this evening. But then, because of the way the repertoire unwinds, Shadows won't be on for another couple of weeks, so there can be long breaks, too, which can be difficult to fill. It's a strange, enclosed existence, but one that I wouldn't have missed for the world." One little bit of home which Roddy has with him is his recently-acquired ESB/Irish Times Theatre Award for best supporting actor in Gary Mitchell's In A Little World of Our Own. It was the latest in a long line of towering roles, which this charismatic actor has set his stamp upon - among them Silas Marner, Lennie in Pentecost, Geraldo in Death and the Maiden, the unhinged John Forster in Hard to Believe and, his favourite, Pavel in Mad Cow's A Place of the Pigs, in which he fearlessly stripped himself physically and psychologically naked. But then, as he owns, he did have a lot of catching up to do. "I was 33 when I came into the business. Definitely getting on a bit", he says. "My younger brother and sister - Andrew and Ethna - were already actors. I had been working as a psychologist in England, but decided the time had come to get out. I had had enough therapy to last me a lifetime. Maybe it was the lurking actor in me, but I found I was taking too many people's problems onto myself - and paying the price. At least now, I can inflict them on others! I did a course in drama therapy, came back to Belfast and rang David Grant to see if he had anything going. He invited me to play Gandalf in a youth production of The Hobbit. I didn't get paid, but I had taken the first step."
The kick-start to his career came in 1988, when he met actor/director Tim Loane, who was still at Queen's University and heavily involved in its thriving drama society. Together they founded Tinderbox Theatre Company, now one of the driving forces in Northern theatre. "Tim was - and is - a real goer. We set up Tinderbox as a way of training ourselves and getting on board people we really wanted to work with - people like Eoin O'Callaghan, Ken Bourke, Eleanor Methven, Tom McLoughlin, and Andy Hinds. We put in place the idea of an annual showcase for new Irish writing - an idea I had while having a pee up an alley in Belfast one night! It's now called April Sundays and is still going strong, producing great new work". He speaks fondly and proudly of Tinderbox and is emphatic that he would love to work with the company again, perhaps as a director. Such ambitions will have to be put on ice for a while, however, as he prepares to open in the RSC main house production of Measure for Measure, in which he plays one of the principal roles of the Provost, with Stephen Kennedy cast alongside him as Claudio. But he looks ahead to a time when this heavy commitment will be over. "With the exception of a little television and film work, I have worked almost exclusively on the stage. But I reckon a year in Stratford will cure me of the boards for a long time. I plan to take a bit of a break, spend time with my kids and make myself available for other things. But, hey, I'm away now. I want to get back to them before they go to bed." He downs his pint and is gone into the night, as the audience emerges from the main house and the chatter along the wet pavements is of merchants and Jews and storms . . . and Ireland.
Measure for Measure, directed by Michael Boyd, opens at the RSC's main house in Stratford-upon-Avon tomorrow)
