A new Canadian play, the talk of the Galway Arts Festival, opened in Dublin last night. The Drawer Boy stars John Mahoney, aka Frasier's dad, and David Calder. David who? You might not know his name, but you certainly know his face - which, he says, is not a good thing in this age of celebrity

There is generous applause as the Peacock Theatre's house lights come up in preparation for the interval. The play on stage is Canadian: Michael Healey's The Drawer Boy. It has transferred from the Galway Arts Festival, where it was the talk of the town. It has a cast of three. The instantly recognisable John Mahoney, fresh from the US sitcom in which he plays Frasier's inimitable dad, is in the role of Morgan the farmer. Local lad Conor Delaney plays the part of a young actor who comes to Morgan's remote farm in Ontario to research a play about farming. And playing the part of Angus, whose memory was shattered by an air raid in the second World War, is . . .? All around the theatre, there is a discreet rustle as people consult their programmes. To the right, somebody is whispering "Calder . . . David Calder. To the left, someone else is is asking "David who?".

Everyone, it seems, wants to know the name of the actor whose performance as Angus has been so funny, so gentle, so maddeningly, memorably, human.

For a performer of Calder's age and experience it is a distinctly bittersweet compliment, as he points out. "Do I get recognised?" Clutching a mug of tea and nursing a nasty summer cold, he settles into a sofa in the comfortable house in Leeson Street where he is staying and says: "I'll tell you a story about that. I once got a cab at King's Cross station - and the taxi driver started to chuckle. And I said, 'What's funny?' And he said, 'Well, it's you.' I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Well, you're one of the unsung heroes, aren't you? 'Because everybody knows your face - but nobody knows your name'.

"There's a truth in that, but it has become a bit unfunny, really - because I work in a world where celebrity casting and celebrity status seems to be dominating everything at the expense of everything else, you know?

"The absence of the name from the face

actually is not very helpful, to be frank about it. It's also quite odd, when you look at the length of his CV: Shylock, Prospero and Mihkail Gorbachev at the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he's an associate member; three series as Doctor Bramwell on the telly, plus a host of guest appearances in everything from Cracker to the recent series Spooks; a respectable smattering of films.

How did he get involved with The Drawer Boy? "It was sent to me in the usual way," he says. "I got a message from my agent saying there would be a play on the way to me - and all I thought was, 'Pray it's bad, so I don't have to do it'. The reason being that I'm stuck with a whole mess of things I have to do in my house, so I was quite certain that I couldn't be out of London just now. But I took one look at it and said, 'Damn - I can't turn this down'. It's one of the best plays I've read in a long time."

It wasn't just the play which appealed to him on that first reading; it was also the role of Angus. "It's beautifully crafted, and it offers such a landscape for an actor to inhabit. You've doubtless heard the expression 'in the moment' - for an actor, it's the best place we can be, and here's a character who is only that. He has no memory that goes either side of the moment - so what you have to do is invent a whole life for the person, which you then have to literally leave behind in order to play that character.

"It's comical, in many ways. Because, you know, actors dread forgetting - and here's a character who forgets all the time."

Calder grew up in Portsmouth in what he describes as an "ordinary working-class" family. "Although," he says, with another chuckle, "I can do this thing that every Englishman can - my father was born in Cork, of Irish-English parentage. I don't think he lived there very long, but that's where he was born.

"Anyhow, I went to school in Portsmouth, and that's where I started acting. I was bored stiff, a summer was coming up, and I just looked around for things to do." A dog-eared sheet on the school notice board advertised auditions for the National Youth Theatre. "I thought I'd give it a whirl, and that was it. I never looked back." He trained at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school, then went into the theatre there, one of the best repertory theatres in England at the time.

"Mine was a smooth path, actually. I was one of the lucky ones. It was so different then. We're talking about - I don't know if I want to say this, but - 1965 to 1967, and in those days you got a grant. I got a university grant - an Oxbridge grant, in fact, which was a fair amount of money; and when I left drama school I had the choice of eight jobs. Now, of course, that's unheard of; but in those days, most of us did. Because in those days theatres had a company of 16 or 17 actors. Nowadays you're lucky if you get four."

CALDER has played a multitude of stage roles since, from Iago at the Young Vic to the Marquis de Sade at the National. But he also does all that telly; in fact, he has just committed himself to the new Lynda LaPlante thriller series The Commander, in which he will play a retired policeman.

"You have to do television because you'd be skint if you just did theatre," he says. "It's still as awful for actors as it has been for centuries - you don't earn any money, and you can't pay the rent. But I like television anyway. I enjoy doing it, and I'm a supporter of TV - but also, it allows you to do a play of choice, like this one. That's the privilege."

As for the elusive celebrity status, he's working on it. Films can provide a short cut, if the parts are right, and he has been making good progress on the big screen of late.

"I've just done a Bond film, The World Is Not Enough. I played a character who doesn't last very long, to say the least - but I managed to get a tremendous review out of it. And at completely the other end, I did a Dogme film called The King is Alive, with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

"It's about nine tourists on a coach going across the Namibian desert who get lost - dangerously. No communication, little water, little food. They're stuck for six weeks in an abandoned diamond mining town which the desert has reclaimed, and someone has the idea of putting on King Lear in order to keep them together - which is very funny, of course. They do it from memory, so some of the lines are absolutely exact and some are very dodgy."

Being a Dogme film, it was filmed in Namibia in an abandoned diamond mine, in sequence, over six weeks, with hand-held cameras, natural lighting, and so forth. High on artistic integrity - and Calder's character was highly praised by the critics, the Independent on Sunday declaring that his "pathos, gravitas and bitter sarcasm make for the film's most compelling performance".

"So, obviously," he says, "the face is out there. The day may come. Who knows?"

The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey is at the Peacock Theatre until August 10th. Booking: 01-8787222/www.abbeytheatre.ie