Arts: The tide is running the way of actor Cathy Belton. She takes time out from rehearsals of 'Playboy of the Western World' to talk to Peter Crawley
Waves keep crashing through my conversation with Cathy Belton, occasionally drowning her softly spoken answers with a sudden surge.
"Apologies," she smiles, "it's the sea."
Although the rehearsal room of the Abbey Theatre is far from any shore, and the surf here has been conjured from the laptop of a sound technician, such is the 34-year-old actor's unswerving humility that it's tempting to think she would take the blame for the elements themselves. Otherwise, in a profession as temperamental as the ocean, the tides seem to be in Cathy Belton's favour.
Most recently you may have seen Belton as Eurydice in The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney's translation of Antigone for the Abbey. Immediately before that you might have been lucky enough to get a ticket to Skylight, David Hare's play, in which Belton's Kyra rekindled a love affair and argued a political position while cooking a meal from scratch. Then there was The Plough and The Stars, Rough Magic's Shiver, Calypso's Stolen Child, A Whistle in the Dark - well, how long have you got?
"I've been very, very lucky," Belton allows. "We all know what this business is like: right time, right place. Very lucky with the roles I have got."
Belton has an elegant way of removing herself from the focus of a question without appearing to dodge it. Asked, for instance, about playing the fiercely impetuous Pegeen Mike in Ben Barnes's new production of The Playboy of the Western World, just three years after playing a sensuously wily Widow Quinn in Niall Henry's startling Peacock production, she glows with praise for the interpretations of Olwen Fouéré (who now exchanges these roles with Belton) before delicately backing into a considered interpretation of the structure of Synge's play.
"I still read it, and think: 'My God, it is quite perfect.' There is no excess; everything is refined," she says.
When she does discuss her approach, refinement is the key.
"I need to arm myself before I come to rehearsals," she explains. "There's nothing that I love more than reading stuff, or gathering raw material around me that I can bring in and then pare away to sculpt out the woman. Hopefully, by the opening night, and by the end of the run, I'll have refined her enough."
Offstage, Belton presents a gracious figure, finding humility in others a cherishable trait. David Hare, she enthuses, was "such a normal, humble, lovely man who was happiest in the rehearsal room". Seamus Heaney, though an icon and a genius, was "so humble and such great fun". The only person who seems to have left her over-awed is Peter Brook, the legendary British theatre director and subject of her Trinity College dissertation.
"He's just my boy," she beams. "I think he's amazing."
Taking her ticket for La Tempête in 1990, when Belton was studying in Nanterre for a year, Brook received a blurted: "Hello, I'm Cathy Belton from Ireland!" Belton chuckles, embarrassed at the memory.
"I just couldn't talk to him," she says. "It's so hard, isn't it though, to define the difference between really respecting somebody's work and being a complete fan."
Listening to performers, theatre critics, the arts editor of The Irish Times and several directors talk about Belton, I'm not sure I can discern the difference either. Even by Irish theatre standards - never exactly economical with public praise - Belton's approvers are incandescent. Michael Caven, director of Skylight, counts among her strengths her openness in performance, her ability to attack a scene tirelessly in rehearsals and her determination to grow with her craft. He insists that she was the only choice for a demanding part - "I know how that sounds," he says, wary of luvviedom, "but she was."
Lynne Parker, who directed Belton in Rough Magic's Shiver and in Tartuffe at the Abbey, is moved to say: "Quite simply, she has this extraordinary clarity and a huge emotional strength and intelligence. She is absolutely beautiful. She's stage beautiful as well as real beautiful - they're not the same thing at all. She has an almost translucent presence on stage. She just attracts light."
For all Belton's talk about the luck of landing roles or the luxury of working in her profession, talent, charm and a steely approach to one's craft can generate its own luck, as Caven suggests. In the rehearsal room, according to Ben Barnes, she throws herself into the process, pushing each possibility with her character before pulling back, a quality he describes as "immediate and dangerous". By her own admission, she immerses herself in the process.
"My friends are very good at this stage; they know when Belton's in rehearsals - you don't really see her," she says. "I can't think of anything else for those four weeks.
"Day one is always one of the most exciting days of your life because it's that wonderful word that David Hare used so much in Skylight: potential. Anything can happen, whether it be an old play, a new play or a devised work."
Belton, as stimulated by the text as she is by finding things out with other actors and directors on the floor, keeps a diary of the process, reviewing it every week, "just to keep an eye on her, to keep an eye on how the sculpture is going".
Growing up in Galway, Belton's first formative experience of acting came at the age of 17, with a National Youth Theatre production of The Crucible.
Directed in a professional manner by Ben Barnes, Belton performed alongside the young Catherine Walsh, Brian Tunder and David Parnell, among others. By the time the show transferred to the Olympia in Dublin for two weeks, Belton was smitten with the stage. After graduating from Trinity, she and a friend set up The Crucial Trading Theatre Company, which lasted for one production, before Belton was spotted by Garry Hynes (then artistic director of the Abbey) and cast in A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer's Assistant.
"That was a great leap," she recalls.
Some years later, though, she lost her nerve.
"I was afraid that I couldn't handle the difficulty of the life, of not knowing where the next pay-cheque was coming from, and I went away from it for four months," she says. Moving back to Galway, she took a job in the CAO office and contemplated becoming a national school teacher. As she tells it, she had to leave acting in order to go back, realising: "No, I can't stay away from this. I would shrivel and shrink as a person."
Soon after, Belton joined the cast of Glenroe, allaying her fears of professional instability for a couple of years.
"Once I took the plunge back in, it was really meant to be," she says. "I was very lucky to get that, to build my confidence up again in the business."
She has worked consistently ever since, and if it is possible to sculpt a career, Belton is a uniquely refined model. By avoiding what one director calls "the decorous roles", which trap many young actors, Belton has exhibited a formidable range, with each character distinct and challenging and representing an artistic progression.
"Her career is on very solid ground," observes Lynne Parker. "Rather than developing with huge flashes she just keeps getting better and better. I think of her still as a very young actress - she's in her 30s - and I think the range of parts she can take on is growing and growing. For some people it starts to shut down."
How Belton maintains such quality control amid the vicissitudes of the stage seems to depend on personal integrity and, thankfully, a shred of ego.
"Obviously it would be a terribly disrespectful thing to take on something that I didn't believe in," she says. "So everything that I decide to do I believe in completely."
More intriguingly, though, she can even erase a blemish. There is one unhappy job, deep in the past, that she would rather not talk about: "I'd just prefer to keep it clean."
Elsewhere, Belton's enthusiasm is unflagging, whether discussing her six-month commitment to The Playboyas it tours Ireland and then the US ("I think it's a bit of a luxury to be with something for so long"), or the quiet triumph of 1994's True Lines, her one devised collaboration, with director John Crowley and actors Stuart Townsend and Tom Murphy ("it was truthful and there were no tricks"), or dubbing The Muppet Show into Irish for TG4 ("great fun, brilliant").
Although unhesitating, considerate and generous with her time, Belton visibly relaxes once our interview finishes.
"These things scare me," she confesses.
As she leads me out through the theatre, we sneak a look at the toweringly complicated technical rehearsal of The Shaughraun. As Belton greets each person on the way with an easy warmth, her effect on other people is somehow more luminescent to observe.
I think back to the sound of the waves, when Belton considered the elements of a fulfilling performance.
"It's a moment-to-moment thing - that's the key to great acting," she says. "It's the thing I struggle with all the time. Peter Brook went on about that: the minute you think you're in the moment, you've lost it. So I suppose it's about . . ."
She pauses once more, waiting for the ocean to calm. " . . . It's about being."