Interviews, Stephen Rea says, make him uncomfortable, yet when it comes to plain speaking, few people in Irish theatre can match his natural gift for expression, writes Peter Crawley
Stephen Rea emerges from rehearsals with his head bowed, his warm features in their characteristic droop, and generally looking like the embodiment of a slump. The difference between the man in the Abbey foyer and Hobart Struther, his nervy character who paces and struts his way through Sam Shepard's bleak comedy Kicking a Dead Horse could not be sharper. Asked if he would now like to have his photo taken for the Irish Times, Rea shrugs, looks a little sadder and his soft brown eyes form a perfect impersonation of a Bassett Hound. "So that's a yes then," laughs his interlocutor, and off he goes.
Rea, the Belfast-born actor whose career has seen him at the epicentre of some of the most significant moments in theatre and film, can amplify his sad-sack persona for comic effect. In conversation, though, he is attentive and alert, if consistently deflective. "This is going to sound really boring," he will say before offering a rather fascinating depiction of London theatre in the 1970s. "I know that sounds wanky," he will add to any shared insight into his craft, as though a big idea requires immediate deflating.
You can see why interviews with the man tend to find room for the words "saturnine", "lugubrious" or "hangdog", but if that is his surface appearance, it isn't one that Rea himself recognises. "Hangdog!" he says, his voice now rising in a quiet corner of the Abbey bar. "Hangdog really gets on my nerves. Well, I don't know that I'm hangdog. That suggests someone skulking around, unengaged. I'm not. I'm engaged, believe me. I have just got a slightly sad face."
He tries to dispel this for a moment and smiles. It is a sad smile. "I go to a lot of trouble when I'm doing a role not to make it the same," he continues, "to make sure that I have some thought going on in my head." Some actors indicate, others try to reveal, but in performance Rea tends to conceal. "My belief about people is that they conceal constantly," he says.
"People don't tell you what they think, and if they tell you what they're thinking, they're usually lying. That's my view. Maybe that's a cynical view of humans, but I do think everyone's protecting themselves all the time."
His style, then, leans towards minimalism; either as the conflicted IRA member Fergus in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game, or as the ineffectual Lenny Harrigan in Pentecost (a part that the playwright Stewart Parker wrote for him). It is not for nothing that his inspirations include Beckett, a man of extreme emotional economy, and the actor Robert Mitchum, someone who could never have been accused of overacting.
It is this self-effacing approach, combined with a deep respect for the integrity of story that seems to endear him to writers. Shepard, too, wrote Kicking a Dead Horse with Rea in mind. "Well I never quite believe that writers write for actors," says Rea, "and, incidentally, I don't think that's necessarily based on the character of the actor. It might be based on the kind of work they do. Stewart Parker wrote a character for me and, to be honest, I think it was more his understanding of the kind of delivery I had, as opposed to me being as feckless as the character. Though I have had my periods of fecklessness like most actors."
That doesn't seem likely. Rea, born to a working-class Protestant family with nationalist sympathies, followed a degree in English at Queen's University by training the Abbey Theatre School, before relocating to London in the early 1970s. "This is probably so boring for you," he apologises.
"FEEL FREE NOT to use this. But if you wanted to be more than an Irish actor, more than an Irish character actor, but still wanted to be Irish, it was tricky to break into English theatre. I did things. But the big, big breakthrough was experimental theatre. I was working with an experimental group called Freehold. That kind of broke the mould of everything. And Sam Shepard being in London was part of the mould being broken. Sam being there was important, because he was a major writer. Not many groups had major writers. A major writer is a rare thing anyway."
In 1974, Rea played the lead in Shepard's Geography of a Horse Dreamer (a play with a premise as Pinteresque as Kicking a Dead Horse is Beckettian) which Shepard directed. They hit it off. Later, Rea performed in Shepard's Killer's Head and Buried Child, and directed Little Ocean, a play for three women which, Rea says, "has never been performed since and was never intended to be".
Much like his association with Neil Jordan - together they have made nine films - Rea's professional relationship with Shepard is big on trust, open to changes, and short on words. "Well, I don't think either of us has the temperament to tolerate a great deal of discussion," he says. "A lot of it is about instinct. To do his plays is a bit different to being in a regular play. It's a bit more like playing jazz, you know? What's demanded of you is a bit different than opening a door and sitting down and pouring a cup of tea. It is more like Beckett, whose an obvious influence. And Pinter. To me those are the three greats of late 20th-century drama."
They are also writers with whom he has had personal contact. "I'm fortunate," he says, "I might actually be the only person who's worked with all three of them in the room. I was directed by Harold in Ashes to Ashes, the first production. I know him very well. I claim I was directed by Sam Beckett. The great Donald McWhinney directed [ Endgame], but Sam was in the room all the time so it felt like being directed by him. I don't offer this in any kind of boastful way, but I realised when Sam [ Shepard] came back to direct [ Kicking a Dead Horse], that it's really remarkable to be directed by these three guys. It's a tribute to my tenacity about the work I want to do; not my achievement in it maybe."
To look at Rea's theatrical CV, much of that work seems unswervingly political. (His film choices are just as considered, he insists, but there's no telling how a film will turn out.) In 1980, he co-founded Field Day with Brian Friel, its vital engagement with political and cultural controversies beginning with Friel's Translations and responsible for adding several plays to the canon: The Communication Cord, Pentecost, The Riot Act. For a while Field Day, which toured nationally and internationally, came to resemble an alternative national theatre.
When Friel offered Dancing at Lughnasa to the Abbey, however, Rea noticeably cooled towards his alma mater. (When Kicking a Dead Horse opened last March in The Peacock¨, it marked Rea's return to the Abbey after a 27-year absence.) "I don't really want to go on about Dancing at Lughnasa," he says, "but my feeling was if you get a major play . . . I mean, we famously took Translations and built a theatre movement with it. But the Abbey didn't use it to change direction. They did it, had a success on Broadway, came back and everything was the same."
It is with plays such as Kicking a Dead Horse - now on the main stage of the Abbey and scheduled to transfer to New York's Public Theater next summer - and the recent production of Edward Bond's Saved, that Rea feels the Abbey is finally seizing an opportunity to change direction: becoming a national theatre that recognises a much wider national interest.
"It's not that it's shrugged off its original agenda," says Rea. "It's broadened it. The original intention [ of the theatre] was to create a nation. Now one could quibble whether a nation, in some sense, really exists. I think for 40 years, maybe more, there wasn't the imagination in this institution to know where to move to next." Rea credits this to Fiach MacConghail, again to an apologetic degree. "This has been a dead institution for a long time. Fiach has miraculously revitalised it. I know it sounds like I'm going on about him, but I wouldn't be here if he hadn't."
Where Kicking a Dead Horse, Shepard's pronouncedly Beckettian riff on the collapse of American culture and the bankruptcy of western iconography, fits into our national discourse isn't immediately easy to locate. The play, written for the Abbey, makes few concessions to its context, at one point asking for a national day of mourning for Crazy Horse, or assuming a familiarity with the fractious American pioneers Lewis and Clark.
"It's about a world for which the central mythical images no longer sustain them. What he's saying in this play is that America can no longer sustain itself on these myths. They've shattered it themselves by using up their own land, by destroying the native American Indian. And, as we've bought into that particular mode of advanced capitalism, it's something that does offer insights for us as well."
Rea, the unsentimental performer who has no time for "pyrotechnical acting" and holds few things sacred, strikes you as a kindred myth-buster. "But that's what all artists do," he continues. "That's particularly what theatre might be good at doing. Writers can offer new myths, new stories."
Rea's arms are folded. His gaze is directed elsewhere. He offers another self-deprecating apology for discussing Bob Dylan's influence on the culture of acting ("this is so boring"). Is he a particularly guarded person? "Of course," he says, and unfolds his arms. Interviews, he says, make him uncomfortable. He recalls being misconstrued early in his London career when asked whether he wanted to be thought of as an Irish actor or just an actor. (Although London theatre tried to bleach his accent, he was perfectly content to be considered an Irish actor.) "There was, at that time, something 'other' about the Irish. If you say I'm guarded, I cherished being 'other'.
More than anything. And I refuse to relinquish it."
Kicking a Dead Horse opens tonight at the Abbey and runs until Sept 22
