At 40, Lorcan Cranitch must be one of the youngest men to ever play the character of Shakespeare's Prospero. The youngest outside a school production, at any rate. It has been a long journey that has led him from a schoolboy interest in acting to the lead role in the Abbey's forthcoming production of The Tempest. A journey marked, he says, as much by chance as by talent.
Cranitch describes himself as "a Dubliner, born and bred". Brought up in Harold's Cross, he attended Terenure College. His father worked in Posts & Telegraphs and his mother worked at home. With no family background in theatre, the chain of chance events that have marked the progress of his career began shortly after leaving school, where he first became interested in theatre. His first lead role came in a school production of Hamlet, but his first professional break came shortly afterwards, initiated by the lead actor dropping out of a professional production of the same play.
Cranitch explains, "I had just played Hamlet a year before, in a school play, so I knew the lines and I'd been very cheeky with prompting - I was assistant stage manager on the production. So when the lead actor dropped out they thought, right, we're stuck. Let's get him to do it. I said, well, I'd love to do it, but I want his wages and I want an Equity card."
The year was 1979 and Cranitch was 19 years old. His professional career as an actor had begun, despite his vague notion that he might have wanted to be an architect or an engineer instead. The word "accident" just keeps recurring in his account of his rise.
But you get the impression that Cranitch is being modest in emphasising the role of the random. Surely there must have been both talent and ambition, two qualities which led him to continue acting and brought him to study at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, from 1980-1982. It was in these two years of training that Cranitch learned his craft, and when he talks about RADA he cannot disguise his fondness for his time there.
"You'd two years and you were encouraged to take as many risks as you possibly could - that's what this business is all about. For those two years you didn't have to worry about your career. It gave you a chance to try out all these different things."
After RADA, Cranitch decided to leave the competitive London theatre scene behind and attempt to forge a career for himself in Scotland. For the next two years he worked with the Citizens' Theatre Company in Glasgow. Here his association with Shakespeare continued, including a role in The Merchant of Venice.
In the years that followed, Cranitch lived a life akin to that of a wandering minstrel. He went to Australia, with Druid Theatre Company's production of The Playboy of the Western World; he played in the original production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, and his craft brought him around Europe, including Russia. But being ever modest when it comes to his curriculum vitae, Cranitch plays down these experiences.
"My travels are slightly glamorised, to be honest. The Russia thing was a job that nobody has ever seen. It was one of the most bizarre pieces of film ever made. It was about Chernobyl and had the title Chernobyl: The Final Warning. It was just hideous. There was this awful line in it. `There's only two things I care about, leukaemia and world peace'." With a kind of world-weary wisdom, this thespian has seen too many highs and lows to be arrogant about his success. He seems unmoved by the fame that has come with such roles as Jimmy Beck in the television series Cracker, or, more recently, as Sean Dillon in Ballykissangel. While he agrees that Cracker proved to be a turning point in his career, he insists again that chance had played its part.
"I ended up with a much more substantial part in Cracker than was there. I think that the instrument of fate is underestimated in this profession. I'm one of the luckiest people I know. So many things have fallen my way. The way that Cracker developed had very little to do with me. One of the cast was leaving. The way they got rid of him started off a whole new storyline for me which just grew and grew and grew. If that actor hadn't decided to leave, who knows what would have happened?"
Cranitch has devoted much of his time to television in recent years, but with The Tempest he makes a welcome return to the theatre. While remaining tightlipped about the details of the production - it opens next week - he says that it promises to be spectacular.
"It's a strange play to be doing for Christmas in the Abbey. The reasoning behind it is that it is the last play of this millennium and one of the themes that is being explored in this production is the fact that the setting for The Tempest is an island in conflict, the resolving of that and how the people on the island are sorting out their situation. It couldn't be a more timely play to be doing." Yet he resists the suggestion that this will be a production dominated by politics. For Cranitch, the political themes of the play are never overt. Words like "magical" and "fantastical" are more apt when describing the play than the word "political", he says, the interview coming to an end. There is still a heavy schedule of rehearsals before opening night and this leading man already appears exhausted. He is eager to be off and the discussion ends. He quickly exits through the office door, suddenly gone, leaving only an empty chair behind him.
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
Before his departure I had pressed him again for some hint of what the audience should expect. "Expect to be amazed," is all he would say.
The Tempest by William Shakespeare opens in The Abbey Theatre on Wednesday, December 8th, directed by Conall Morrison