Towards the turn of the millennium, Conleth Hill, then a theatre actor in his mid-30s, found himself at a juncture. After a decade working regularly in Belfast, he had finished ticking off a list of roles he had had in mind since leaving drama school.
It was a period when, against the extraordinary promise of IRA ceasefires, many members of the city’s vibrant theatre community lived on Sunnyside Street, which has the Errigle Inn, a popular actors’ haunt, at one end and the Lyric Theatre at the other.
Hill had been seen on the venue’s stage a lot. In one 12-month period he appeared as the patricidal impostor of JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World and as the top-buttoned florist in Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s musical Little Shop of Horrors. (Both had been on his list of roles to play.)
“I got to do them all, but I was also excited to not have a plan,” Hill says backstage at the Gate Theatre, in Dublin, where he is in rehearsals to play King Lear.
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When the Lyric asked him what he’d like to do next, there was one play he wanted to revisit. A few years earlier, in 1996, he starred in Stones in His Pockets, a new comedy by Marie Jones. Hill played an aspiring screenwriter who signs up as a film extra when his Kerry village is overrun by a Hollywood production crew whose glitterati presence has a strange influence on locals, even driving one poor man to suicide.
The Lyric’s revival of Jones’s play was expected to run only a couple of weeks. It seemed unfeasible to fly home Hill’s original stage partner, Timothy V Murphy, who had relocated to the United States (and is now a real-life Hollywood regular), so he was replaced by the very capable Sean Campion.
The play became a sensation over the next two years, filling a smaller London playhouse before transferring to the West End, and eventually to Broadway, where it clocked up $1 million in ticket sales before it even arrived in New York.
“I think it was word of mouth. It wasn’t critics. It wasn’t money being thrown to market it. It was just people going to other people, ‘Do you want to see that?’” Hill says. He liked that the play made for a kind of counterpoint to a film released earlier that decade, Ron Howard’s epic romance Far and Away, featuring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman with questionable Irish accents.
“Where Hollywood is concerned, it’s a case of, why would you let reality get in the way of a good story?” Hill says.
Crucial to the play’s appeal seemed to be how, as a multiple-role comedy, it turned its virtuosity into a buzzy attraction. The production’s minimalist set was limited to a line-up of villagers’ footwear stretching across the back of the stage, as if set up as a dare: can just two actors fill all these shoes?
“It’s amazing how, because of budget and other restraints, creativity can really be something.”
The format wasn’t anything new; this was around the time that John Godber’s relentless, character-shifting workplace comedies were making him one of the most performed playwrights in the UK.
What seemed to hit differently were the performances. Hill shape-shifted from a hopeful Kerry screenwriter to a Hollywood diva, breathily lusting over local men, and then, with a suddenly straightened spine, became an intimidating, bolt-upright security guard. Each character seemed to receive a detailed, full-body portrait.
Stones in His Pockets opened doors. “I certainly had no problems afterwards with people going, ’Do you think you could do it?’, whatever the part was, because I think the play proved I could be that versatile,” Hill says.
When The Producers, Mel Brooks’s comedy about Broadway schemers, opened in the West End of London, Hill played a glamorously sociopathic director, acting opposite Nathan Lane.
In Jennifer Saunders’s unsettling, short-lived sitcom The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle, a satire of exploitative tabloid talkshows (the title is a barely veiled reference to Jeremy Kyle), Hill was an absurdly groomed metrosexual husband to Saunders’s monstrous TV host. (“She was brilliant. And that ego she portrayed!”)
Of course, it was HBO’s fantasy series Game of Thrones that introduced him to a wider audience. Hill stepped into that mercilessly cruel and graphic epic about rival royal families as Lord Varys, an elegantly refined spy with scathing wit. He was in no rush to take the part. “I was resistant for a long time. I’m not into wizards,” he says.
He was swayed when he read a scene in which the show’s hero, the salty dwarf Tyrion Lannister, searches for revenge after surviving an attempt to murder him. Prying open a crate delivered to his quarters, he tells Tyrion that as a child he was abused by a sorcerer.
The scene ends with the opened crate revealing that it contains the trembling abuser, sent overseas by one of the spy’s informants. “I soon learned that the contents of a man’s letters are more valuable than the contents of his purse,” Varys says.
Being part of a bigger-than-life show, the kind that attracts swarms of devotees to Comic-Con, can define an actor in a way they dislike (as on the cult film Galaxy Quest, in which Alan Rickman plays a theatre actor made miserable after appearing as an alien scientist on TV).
Hill seems fond of Game of Thrones. The role complemented the rest of his CV rather than obliterate it. “I don’t think it was a typical casting call. They wanted people who could handle the language, who had done Shakespeare,” he says. (Hill had starred in a production of All’s Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre in London.)
Game of Thrones soon attracted comparisons with Shakespeare in its plotting and colour – and there was certainly something of a parallel between the atmosphere of productions such as the Abbey’s 2013 revival of King Lear and the TV show’s wind-beaten version of medieval Europe. (Game of Thrones, with its echoes of the Wars of the Roses, also featured gruesomely creative acts of cruelty, aggrieved offspring bent on power, and goading, bloodthirsty spouses.)
Hill himself seemed to have a mixed history with the playwright. He related early on to All’s Well That Ends Well, with its teenager stung by unrequited love, but by the time he was studying in London he was running in the opposite direction. (“I was never a fan of the Royal Shakespeare Company voice,” he says.) Playing Macbeth opposite Frances McDormand in the United States in 2016 signalled that he may have changed his mind.
Then, a few years ago, Hill reconnected with Róisín McBrinn, the Gate’s artistic director. The two worked together 20 years ago, on the London premiere of Owen McCafferty’s heist play Shoot the Crow. The offer came for Hill to direct a play at the theatre: Arthur Miller’s 1967 classic The Price. During that run McBrinn asked Hill what he thought about playing Lear.
Shakespeare’s play begins with a crass spectacle. The king, preparing for old age, summons his three daughters and asks them, as if they’re pageant contestants before an audience, to answer a question: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?”
“I’d stand up for him,” Hill says. “You give one-third of a kingdom to a daughter and they feel hard done by?”
The play soon recedes into the turmoil of Lear’s mind, while a catastrophic transfer of power shakes the kingdom, separating men and women from their fathers.
“During the course of it he realises how wrong he was, but then he also realises how wrong his life was,” Hill says. “All this pomp, all these large effects that go with majesty, have nothing to do with how people live their lives day to day. He goes, ‘I have taken too little care of this.’”
Hill is sympathetic about Lear’s crisis. “The anger, the frustration and – I speak from experience – the invisibility of ageing,” he says. “You identify as you grow older: ‘Oh, I’m invisible now.’ That’s dealt with in the play. Four hundred years ago he’s writing about it. That’s why it’s so good.”
King Lear opens at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, February 26th, with previews from Saturday, February 21st. It runs until Sunday, April 27th
