"SOMEONE told me once I have a tragic face," says Ger Ryan. Sipping wine and looking anything but tragic in a Dublin restaurant, she dissolves easily into laughter. But soon the shadows deepen again and her gaze intensifies: "I am serious, and I think deeply about everything." You can see why she was chosen to play the long suffering character of Paula in Roddy Doyle's TV drama, Family (1994); why she will appear as Juno in O'Casey's Juno And The Paycock in the Abbey in June; and why she has the title role in Paula Meehan's first play for adults, Mrs Sweeney, which opens at the Project at the Mint tomorrow.
"There are inequalities everywhere. Everything is not alright. These women express griefs we haven't dealt with in our collective unconscious," says Ryan. She sees both Juno and Lil Sweeney as "matriarchal archetypes".
It is true that there are many observable similarities between the two. Mrs Sweeney lives in the contemporary version of O'Casey's Dublin tenements and has lost a daughter to AIDS (in O'Casey's day the equivalent was TB). All around her there are young people taking drugs, dying from AIDS, and breaking into their neighbours' flats ("preying on their own people like animals").
In the midst of ruin and without the support of her withdrawn, psychologically upset husband, Lil manages to survive, dress herself up for a street carnival and have a few laughs at the absurdity of life: "Father Tom will be in South America by Faster. A postcard from Peru. Saving the savages for Coca Cola."
"Mrs Sweeney is a story of working through grief that is also very humorous," explains Ryan. "She's coming to terms with the fact that it is a year since her daughter died, and her flat has been trashed by her own neighbours four times in the last month." It is a gruelling role for any actor. All the dramatic action centres around Mrs Sweeney: she is on stage all the time.
"I'm getting to know her," says Ryan, who was two weeks into rehearsals when this interview took place. "I ask myself: Would she clean this now? No, she'd be too pissed off. The actions must ring true. Then there's the humour. She does have a ballsy sense of humour. Then I have to figure out when she'd express her anger and rage." Ryan is pleased with the play: "It's terrific. I don't sit around reading plays. I'm not intellectual. I'm more interested in the humanity of the character and her emotional life."
Perhaps because of her "tragic face", but really, because of her fascination with "myth, passion and primitive rage", she would love to do the Greek plays: "I'm fascinated by Medea in particular. The Greeks really knew what they were doing. It's all about passion.
She finds there is a distinct shortage of interesting parts for women, whether on stage or on screen: "The ones you get, you grab. The typical parts for women involve no personality or history. Anyone could play them. You get interesting parts for men who are all ages, shapes and sizes. Then you get parts for a couple of beautiful, formulaic women in their 20s who are just sidekicks."
The part of Paula in Family was "one of the best I've ever had. Roddy is a great writer. It was such a well written script. His dialogue gives you characters you can inhabit. If I never do another thing, I'll be happy with that part." She liked the fact that the director, Michael Winterbottom, didn't try "to nicefy things". "It was made by the BBC, God bless them".
RYAN never wanted to be a celebrity, but so many Irish people watched Family that she was spotted regularly by passers by on the street: "The saddest thing was that they couldn't remember her name. They'd say `There's Charlo's wife'. I'd reply `Her name is Paula'. I get very protective about these things."
Another part she relished was that of Bess in Vincent Woods's Song Of The Yellow Bittern, for which she won an EMA award: "It is a stunning play, set in the 1849s in preFamine Leitrim, and also in the present day. It shows how the consequences of one action reverberate through time. It is an emotional journey for the audience. People, were crying when it was over.
She likes playing comedy, and sometimes fears that she will remain stuck in "the tragic groove" in which she so clearly excels. When I ask her about her background, she is quick to explain that the intensity she brings to the sorrowful parts she has played does not stem from a traumatic youth. "I had a lovely gentle middleclass upbringing in Mount Merrion. I was very loved and had lots of friends. Everyone assumes I'm from the north inner city with an impoverished and difficult background. They forget it is my job to portray people who are different from me.
Ryan did not start out in life as an actress. She spent time in Minneapolis in the US, worked in catering and in her father's travel agency, before she decided to take classes at the Brendan Smith Theatre Academy. "My sister was going and I thought I'd join her and maybe do theatre management. The first play I read was Pirandello's Six Characters In Search Of An Author. It demystified theatre for me. I thought you had to have gone to Trinity or be born into a theatrical family."
She ended up working for Passion Machine, in administration stage management, and finally, as an actress: "My first part was Angela in Wasters. I worked a lot for Passion Machine. Paul Mercier is very talented: a brilliant writer and a brilliant director. In any other country that guy would be snapped up. He'd have so many choices."
She enjoyed being part of a theatre company and found the focus on "a new physical style of acting" exciting. After a few years in the mid to late 1980s with Passion Machine, she landed the part of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy Of The Western World at the Abbey.
"This was supposed to be my breakthrough," she recalls. "Everyone said `isn't it marvellous'. I went in wide eyed." She was soon disappointed. "I was used to working as part of a team. There was no sense of that, and no sense of finding the truth. I was sad about that." Another "breakthrough" that people congratulated her on was getting the part of Bernie Kelly in Fair City in 1989.
She became disillusioned with the "politics" of the business of theatre in Ireland, however, and gave up acting for a while.
"I joined Greenpeace and trained to do actions on the high speed inflatables. You get to be the good guy in a James Bond way. But I never ended up doing hard actions. The guys who did them were really brave." She decided to go back to acting, the experience with Greenpeace having shown her that, should acting again prove unsatisfactory, "there are other ways of expression". She says wryly: "If I thought I was going to spend the rest of my acting career playing boring women, I'd give it up tomorrow.
She is pleased to find that on stage and screen she is now getting interesting parts that are not one dimensional, and not designed for younger women (she is 38). Recently she appeared in the film version of Roddy Doyle's The Van. She will appear in a BBC drama series called Plotlands which is due to be screened later this month (in which Saskia Reeves plays the lead role).
She believes that if more women were writing screenplays in Ireland, there would be more substantial opportunities for Irish actresses here. To this end, she is in the process of writing her own screenplay, with fellow actor Caroline Rothwell. "There's no point moaning and doing nothing. I want to put my money where my mouth is. And I like collaboration, that's why I'm not doing it on my own.
"Truth" is a word to which Ger Ryan returns again and again. With regard to her candour, she says: If something is wrong, I have to say it." About Mrs Sweeney, she observes: "You read about entire families decimated by AIDS. They end up being statistics, and statistics protect us from the truth." About her own acting, she says: "I have to be extraordinarily hard on myself to get to the truth of a person's life." Why is this so important? "Because I often wonder if I'm a fraud. It is a classic fear of actors when you are playing a part outside your own experience. I'm afraid that some day, someone will stand up in the theatre and point a finger at me and say `she's pretending'."
