Finding their voice: Irish actors urged to lose their accents

Fiana Toibin was the only Irish actor in the recent production of Mark O'Rowe's Crestfall at the Irish Arts Centre, and her experience of being Irish in New York has been a largely positive one. "The hard part is to go outside only being seen for Irish roles," she says.

"If you can manage to talk someone to letting you in the door to read for something non-Irish, you're lucky."

Sometimes that someone can be the actor's own agent - this has been the experience of Tim Ruddy, who moved here earlier this year and who, after a run in Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Irish Repertory Theatre, is currently working not onstage but on his American accent, on the orders of his agent, who has assigned him a dialect coach.

"The quicker you can get directors thinking of you as someone other than an Irish actor, the better," he agrees.

For Fiona Walsh, who has lived in New York for 10 years, the biggest challenge is the lack of roles available, in Irish plays, to female actors. "A lot of the time, you're seen to be only able to play the nanny, the nurse, and the nun," she says.

"But there are great opportunities, and you can work your way up. It just takes a while longer, if you're an actress, especially an Irish actress. Really, you have to generate your own work."

And then, of course, there is the competition for parts from the Irish-American actors, of whom there are thousands.

Paul Coughlan, Queens-born but with Irish parents, tells of playing a Dublin construction worker onstage recently and of "shocking" those people who spoke to him afterwards, by revealing his own accent.

Is he conscious that there are a lot of Dubliners in New York who would be glad of just such a part? "Funny enough, I can't remember ever, ever meeting an Irish actor," he says.

Meanwhile, Peter Dobbins, director of Storm Theatre Company, which recently staged a production of Jim Nolan's The Salvage Shop, with just one Irish actor, argues that many parts are immediately available to Irish actors, but that they may comprise a poisoned chalice of sorts.

"Actors come here, and initially get work, and think they are doing well," he says. "But that is not realistic. Because yes, those parts are theirs. But that's not making it in the greater industry."