He is just getting to grips with his role in Brian Friel's new play but actor Tom Courtenay is already speaking of his character in the first person, writes Belinda McKeon
Gore, the gentle Anglo-Irishman and master of the Big House at the centre of Brian Friel's new play, The Home Place, which opens at the Gate Theatre next month.
"I showed my wife the script, and she read it," says Courtenay, all traces of his northern English background seeming now smoothed from his accent, as he relaxes in his hotel after a hard but fruitful day in rehearsal. "And she said that if I didn't do it, she'd leave me."
That was that, then. But even if Isabel hadn't put her foot down so firmly, the legacy of the birthday present with which she surprised her husband this time last year was sure to have done the job. Knowing of his fondness for Ireland - the couple take a cottage in Connemara during the summer months, and Courtenay traces his roots back to Killaloo in Co Clare - Isabel organised a trip to Dublin, part of which took in a performance of perhaps Friel's most loved play, Dancing at Lughnasa, which was running in the Gate at the time.
"She dragged me there," admits Courtenay, "because I'm not a great theatre-goer. And I had seen Lughnasa at the National. But seeing it at the Gate was a very powerful experience for me. We both loved it. And I wrote to Michael Colgan to tell him so."
Not long afterwards, Colgan had an offer for Courtenay, and one which he couldn't turn down, despite the bout of ill-health which kept his acting to the minimum in 2004. And so he came to Dublin at the beginning of the month, and since then has been spending his days in rehearsal with Adrian Noble, the director of the Gate production, and with a cast which includes Hugh O'Conor, Nick Dunning and Derbhle Crotty. Courtenay and O'Conor play a father and son, living in the grand but crumbling lodge at Ballybeg at the end of the 19th century, with only their domestic staff for company - among them the housekeeper Margaret, played by Crotty, who means perhaps more than she should to both men.
"They both need her, rather," says Courtenay, with a shrug. "There is something in that relationship."
Not unlike many of the older inhabitants of the Big Houses depicted in novels from around the same period - Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September, or The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross - Friel's Christopher (the father) is almost oblivious to the stirrings of revolution in the country around him. Though he is the employer of the Irish men and women who live in his home, and though he is an Englishman, first and foremost, to the villagers among whom he spends his days, it scarcely occurs to him to see things that way.
"The boy, David, has more of an idea," says Courtenay. "Just as I have more of an idea than my father, and certainly my grandfather. So my son has gone further down that road, he'd go in the pub, but still . . . he's still not one of them. And never will be. Maybe it will, maybe something will dissolve. But I'm never going to be one of them."
Courtenay is not talking about himself here, but about Christopher; he has a disarming, if sometimes confusing, tendency to speak of his character in the first person. It comes, you sense, from living in such proximity to the minds and the moods of Friel's turn-of-the-century Ireland, and from feeling with his character an empathy so complete that it can defy everyday logic.
"You know, looking at Hugh yesterday, I thought: 'Oh, that must be what Lucy looked like,' " he says.
Lucy, the dead wife of Christopher Gore, is mentioned only in passing in the play, yet somehow lives on, it would seem, in the charged air of the house and its relationships. To Courtenay, she is obviously a very real presence.
"Well, I thought, he could be my son, but he doesn't look greatly like me, he's not a great big strapping lad, so . . . I just thought of that, yesterday," he says.
IT'S UNSURPRISING THAT a son's connection with his mother should be so much to the fore of Courtenay's mind as he works to understand Friel's characters. The striking intensity of his relationship with his own mother received memorable expression in Letters From Home, the memoir he wrote two years ago. In the book, letters sent by Annie Courtenay, a working-class woman still living in her native Hull, to her actor son in London, growing more famous by the day, are published alongside Courtenay's recollections of his life in the years that he received the letters. Born in Hull in 1937, Courtenay won a scholarship first to the local grammar school, where he took up acting, and then to University College London, where he read English. But the call of the stage was stronger, and he soon took a place at RADA.
His success was immediate, partly due to his talent, partly due to the purity of his working-class northern credentials - it was the thing to be on the London scene of the 1960s.
Among his first roles were the rebel leads in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963); in 1965, his performance as Pasha in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. After something of a hiatus in his film career during the 1970s, during which he concentrated on stage work, he returned in 1983 to earn another Oscar nomination for his performance in Peter Yates's The Dresser. Since then, he has mixed television and theatre work with more sporadic screen performances, though his sensible undertaker in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders four years ago showed that the early power has scarcely dwindled. All that's missing are the constant letters from his mother.
"Oh, I was a mother's boy," he says, unashamedly. "Oh, the letters I got, Jesus."
People were very moved by the book, and by Courtenay's public readings, I remind him.
"I was very moved," he says. "I had to stop doing it, I had to stop doing readings from it. It upset me so much. And one of the last ones, I thought I was okay, didn't have to explain myself, thought I would just read it - and I couldn't get it out. It still affects me. Oh no, that's my favourite thing of anything I've ever done. It's in the rehearsal room, you know. I find the cast reading it."
He laughs a little. "I think they're researching me."
He's resolute in his determination not to tell me the plot of The Home Place, and at first even resists the idea of talking about his character and his situation. Of the spanner which Nick Dunning's character, Richard, the English anthropologist cousin of Christopher, throws into the works when he comes to Ballybeg with his abrasive and patronising attitude towards the natives, he's willing to say little, except to talk with wonder about Friel's handling of the violence and the anger Richard arouses.
His reticence comes not from obstinacy; he says he just doesn't know "what it is yet", and won't know until the end of rehearsals. Or perhaps not even then, he worries.
"You progress some days more than others," he says. "I phoned my wife feeling depressed the other day, which you just do, some days, you just do. And she said, well, you know, you don't go forward every day. It goes better, like any job, some days than others. And plays . . . they can slip through your fingers. You get that burst of energy, or emotion, or an idea about how to do a little passage - it comes to you, hopefully."
THE PRESSURE GOES on well beyond opening night - Courtenay likes to have a few performances under his belt before he feels totally comfortable in a role.
"About six weeks' worth, actually," he laughs. "One day you'll get it all right. Hopefully."
In the meantime, the language of Friel's play, is, he says, that of a master. I moot the often-aired comparison of Friel to Chekhov, and Courtenay instantly agrees.
"Like Chekhov, he can write more than one part, and a lot of the moderns can't, they'll write one part, and the others will stand around," he says. "But this play, every part is a good part. That's the sign of a good theatre man, when nobody has nothing to do. And the economy, and the elegance by which he lays out the information, is dazzling."
Then he stops, and frowns; it seems that what he has just said doesn't, for Courtenay, quite express the impact Friel and his play have had upon him.
"No, I don't want to over-praise him," he says. "Not dazzling. But impressive. Impressive to read. Where it goes and whether people are interested, I can't say. We like it, and it's starting to come together now, it's quite exciting.
"It's like a piece of music, and Brian has said that he does feel you should learn a play like a piece of music. And I told him I agreed with that."
He's still worried, though. "Then I told him: 'You have to remember, Brian, that musicians occasionally play a wrong note.' "
He smiles. "But we were pleased today." A laugh. "Adrian gave me a tick, he put a tick on my script."
And that, for Courtenay, is the sign of a good day's work.
The Home Place opens on Tuesday, February 1st; previews from January 27th. Booking: 01-8744045 www.gate-theatre.ie