From Eyre Square to Quay Street to Chapel Lane, conversations on a homecoming can be heard once more in the city of tribes. More than 10 years after his decision to exit the Galway stage where he learned his trade, Sean McGinley is back in town, appearing in a new production of a new play on the old stage where everything began for Druid. With rehearsals for Michael Collins's The Hackney Office taking place at Druid Lane under the watchful gaze of director Garry Hynes, it's clear that the old school is back in business, at least for a while.
"Coming back into the rehearsal room there two weeks ago, with Garry, it was like we'd never left," says McGinley. "She's one of the great directors, really. She's not afraid of anything. You know, the opening night syndrome is not a priority with her. Rather, how far we can go with this play, how far we can explore this thing - that's the priority with her."
But a great number of priorities have changed in the two decades since McGinley was recruited by Hynes and Marie Mullen, now his wife, to be a part of the first professional theatre group outside of Dublin. His first months with Druid saw him combining a role in its first major production, Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, with the task of converting a warehouse in Galway's back-streets into a 120seater auditorium for the young company.
By now, the back-streets have been devoured by commercial developments, Druid has brought full houses on Broadway to their feet, and McGinley has become one of Ireland's most renowned screen actors for his powerful portrayals of dangerous Dubs, in films like Roddy Doyle's Family and John Boorman's The General as well as in RTE's first bash at a tough police drama, Making the Cut. Yet working with Hynes and her latest discovery - writer Michael Collins, from Dunshaughlin in Co Meath - on the new play, he has been reminded of one of the very first lessons he learned during his 10 years with Druid: before an actor can tread the boards, he has to find the independence to lay them for himself. McGinley sees the rehearsal time in theatre as invaluable in forging just this sort of independence, encouraging an exchange of ideas between those involved.
"I think this play is going to be great fun to do from an acting point of view, because it's very free, very open," he says. "You know, with the rehearsal process we can try anything really. I suppose that's what a rehearsal process should be: you push and dig and see how far you can go." It's a flexibility and freedom which informs everything the company does. In 1982, for example, at the suggestion of Mick Lally, it took The Playboy to Inishmaan; and later, in 1997, there were no hesitations when it decided to stage all three of Martin McDonagh's Leenane plays. By putting on The Hackney Office, Hynes has demonstrated once again that she is unafraid to give first plays a high-profile production. The play tells the story of three men whose lives intersect in a taxi office in inner-city Dublin, far away from the shebeens and kitchens of the west with which Druid is commonly associated. McGinley plays the part of Danny, a shady face from the past who turns up unexpectedly to complicate affairs in the office.
The actor has obviously been seriously impressed by Collins's writing. "It's an extraordinarily accomplished piece," he says. "Very funny in terms of dialogue, but there's a very hard edge running through it as well." This new theatrical role, then, seems very much in line with the film and television work that McGinley has done over the last decade. It seems that every character he has played on-screen has been at least rough around the edges, if not downright psychopathic. But while friends and colleagues may be amused to see this gentle-mannered, almost bashful man repeatedly hunted down by directors to play angry, often violent types, McGinley is keenly aware of the dangers of typecasting and utterly dismissive of the suggestion that he specialises in unsavoury types.
"Once you start even thinking like that, then all you do is just bring a bag of tricks with you and it becomes meaningless," he says. "You have to have a response to a particular story. I think it has to come from the script. In terms of setting up the character, I don't think that you construct a character beforehand, you don't bring that in - it's the other way around. You dig around in the script and you find your response to it, and you develop that, and you try and dig deeper and deeper into it." From the outside, a pattern may be discerned running through his roles, but McGinley is not concerned with the bigger picture; his policy is to approach each character on its own terms, to read each story anew. "You know, the word `menacing' has been used more than once," he says. "I don't know where that's coming from because I can't be objective about it. I like characters that have contradictions. I think most good writing has." As easily as he has taken to work in front of the camera, as much as he has enjoyed working with directors like Boorman and Jim Sheridan (The Field), and as eagerly as he anticipates his forthcoming part in the new Martin Scorsese film, McGinley gives the distinct impression of being relieved to be back, for now, on the open space of the stage after a seven-year absence. Free of the technical restrictions of shooting to film, and with a greater emphasis on rehearsal as a forum for the growth of the work, theatre affords more room for that element of contradiction which appeals to him.
There is another sense in which theatre is, for him, the subtler medium: it can manipulate the tension between the real and the imagined with greater success, he believes, than can film or television drama. "The screen or the cinema invites the outside world in somehow," he explains. "Maybe it's just the way audiences are trained, that if you refer to something outside, then the tendency is that the audience have to see what the outside being talked about is."
However, despite being set, very convincingly, in the heart of the inner city, The Hackney Office is no attempt at gritty realism, a genre which McGinley sees as having sold out, with a glut of television dramas in recent years, to cliche and formula. "The play is not a documentary, it's not about that at all," he says. "It's very much about the people, and you're kind of aware of this world outside. The place it's set in very much informs what's going on on stage, but the audience imagine what the outside world looks like - you don't see anything . . . There's a set with a window looking out, but it's painted out, whitewashed out, with a couple of places where you can look out, at the top or whatever. So you have to imagine. And so do we."
With the rough streets stalked by some of his most memorable characters placed at a distance, McGinley can direct his concentration towards whatever emerges, this time around, on the stage he built with his own hands. "I suspect that no writer - that I know anyway - sees something wrong in society and says `I'm going to write a play to protest against this', or whatever," he argues. "I think that the thing that probably makes writers write is, like all of us, it's an attempt to find out where we are in relation to everything else around us.
"You're scooping away, trying to bring a thing into sharper focus. I think it's a good description of what acting should be about as well. It only has meaning, you know, if it reveals maybe something of yourself."
The Hackney Office opens on December 5th.
Belinda McKeon was this year's runner-up in the Student Critic category of the Guardian Student Media Awards.
