The life of an actor, with its endless simulations, lends itself to an examination of the big questions, playwright Stuart Carolan and actor Sean McGinley tell Peter Crawley.
Why are we here? How much time do we have left? Is there an underlying meaning to any of this? Or are we simply on a disjointed, random journey towards the inevitable? Such searching questions, best reserved for long dark nights of the soul, are generally not ones to be encouraged among the audience for a new play.
But Stuart Carolan's Empress of India, the Dublin writer's follow-up to 2004's excellent Defender of the Faith at the Abbey, does not shy from such metaphysical probings. It may centre on a fading Irish film star called Seamus Lamb, abandoned to grief and inured to the tribulations of his family, but at its heart it offers the picture of a world without faith, without soul, hollow at the core. It is, of course, a comedy.
The role of the fading star was written specifically for Sean McGinley, the Donegal-born actor whose career began (almost accidentally) during the early days of Druid and has grown in the 30 years since to encompass innumerable roles in television and film. Seamus Lamb is a firecracker, a character of manic explosions and sudden slumps, capable of torrents of thought and devoid of self-censorship. If the part had been written for, say, Tom Hickey, it might make some obvious sense. But Seamus is difficult to reconcile with the tall, deferential and exceedingly gentle man picking at a sandwich in a bar on Galway's High Street.
"Whether he wrote it with me in mind, I don't know," McGinley says with some deflection. "It doesn't seem like that. It has nothing to do with me other than the character I play in it is an actor. Maybe you'd be better off asking him about it."
Dressed entirely in black, McGinley is a striking figure, his perfectly white hair long and slightly tangled, his beard unshaven. He looks as though he is preparing to play the part of King Lear - which may not be that far from the truth.
"Absolutely, it was written for him," Carolan confirms the following day. The two men have slightly different recollections of the play's genesis, but by both accounts it sprung from their first encounter, two years ago, when Garry Hynes had been tentatively attached to direct Defender of the Faith and McGinley had performed a reading of the play. (For various reasons it never happened, but Carolan has wanted to work with them ever since.)
"We were talking about actors and acting, some people I admired and some people I had worked with," recalls McGinley. "We were talking about people who are famous and how difficult that might be for their families. You hear stories that it's difficult for their offspring because some of these people are very outgoing and charismatic and they suck all the air out of the room. Maybe I was describing someone in particular [Carolan mentioned Richard Harris], but that's neither here nor there, because I think the play was there in Stuart's head anyway. It was just a matter of accessing it."
In Carolan's eyes, McGinley is not that far from the charismatic figure he had described. "Sean's very gentle and he's quiet," says Carolan, "which I think is in the character I wrote; gentle and almost childlike. But then, with a few drinks on him . . ." He laughs. "Sean can be very funny as well. He does impersonations and he's good crack."
When Druid's production of Empress of India opens in the Town Hall theatre on September 12th, it will be McGinley's first time on stage in more than five years. Before that, it had been another five years since he trod the boards. Despite a screen career that took off following his striking performance in Roddy Doyle's television series, The Family, and has since included films with Michael Winterbottom and, most recently, John Boorman, he does not consider himself a theatrical agnostic.
"Oh God, no," he says. "That isn't by choice really. My missus is an actor and having two kids makes it difficult for us both to do theatre."
His missus is Marie Mullen, co-founder of Druid and the person who approached him one day on Shop Street, in the late 1970s, and asked him to audition for a play. "I really thought she was . . . insane!" he says, his smile widening. But McGinley, who had studied arts in Galway and then reluctantly found himself on a dreary path towards becoming a teacher, auditioned anyway. Garry Hynes cast him as Shawneen Keogh in her 1977 production of Playboy of the Western World and McGinley never looked back.
"I knew I didn't want to be a teacher and that was for sure," he says. The theatre gave him a sense of purpose. "I thought, this is something I can do. There was nothing I wouldn't try. There are certainly a lot of things I can't do as an actor, but I don't think there's anything I wouldn't try." Empress of India offers a considerably less empowering view of life as a performer. "I know nothing," Seamus says at one point. "I am an actor. People put words into my mouth and I pretend to think . . . I am a make-believe man."
Carolan doesn't elaborate easily on his play. "I know from talking to Sean, and talking to different actors, that they're very aware that what they do is a strange universe to inhabit. I think everyone has a sense, sometimes, that they're living in the world and it's only make-believe. With actors it's more heightened."
Belief of another kind is more routinely questioned in the play as characters try to come to terms with death, grief and emotional abandonment in the absence of spiritual support. Significantly, one scene takes place in a bar that has been converted from a church; others pivot around the death of Pope John Paul II. Throughout, characters wrestle with demons, reject the existence of God and struggle with the existence of the soul.
"I wanted to look at the idea of belief or non- belief," says Carolan. "It's something I find difficult, because I don't believe in anything. The thing is, you mightn't believe in the idea of the soul or God or anything, but that doesn't mean you don't have the need for it."
Quite a lot of people are like Brendan Behan, he says: daylight atheists. "In the dark of the night you want to believe in something." McGinley also considers himself spiritually agnostic, envious of those with unswerving faith but frustrated by the organised religion he now only encounters at funerals. "It's like you're dealing with a junior executive in a multinational corporation," he says. " 'Oh no, the man up top says you can't have a eulogy.' "
He is also deeply sceptical about politics. What else is there to believe in? "People in general, I think," he replies. "You always sense that there's a longing there for someone to tell the truth. I suppose, to get back to what's good about this piece of work, is that it's truthful. That's something we can recognise instinctively, and it's very uplifting - no matter what a person is saying, even if you don't agree with it, they're saying what they actually mean."
Life is not like a play, however, as his character decides. And in Empress of India's Shakespeare quotations, Chekhovian plot devices, and an all-pervading sense of self-awareness, it's hard to allay the suspicion that Carolan is also questioning his belief in the theatre itself, that strange congregation where words made flesh.
"I don't know, is the answer," he says. Does he believe in theatre's power to connect? "Yeah, I do," he says with more enthusiasm. "I believe in its power to connect with an audience and that's a kind of important thing. In some ways I see the play as a desperate prayer, and I want to see if the audience feel the same, if they hear me. Particularly when you're looking at things about loss and grief and not being sure in believing in God. A lot of people out there have experienced loss and I would like the play to connect with them. That's really important for me."
Nature abhors a vacuum, and in the absence of spirituality something will always rush in to fill its place. Interestingly, both McGinley and Carolan become positively reverent when they speak about Druid: the purpose of the current ensemble, the preternatural anticipation of the crew, how Garry Hynes moves in mysterious ways.
McGinley may not know what he will do after Empress, but is contentedly resigned to the unpredictable nature of his career.
Carolan, meanwhile, is working on two new plays - one for the Royal National Theatre and one for the Abbey - but will talk about neither. ("I'm superstitious. If I talk about it then it won't happen.") Both might question religion, it seems, but they understand that every piece of theatre is an act of faith. In that respect, at least, they are true believers.
Druid, by arrangement with Galway Arts Festival, presents Empress of India, Sept 12-23, at Town Hall Theatre, Galway, and Oct 4-14 in the Abbey during Dublin Theatre Festival (www.dublintheatrefestival.ie)