Frankie McCafferty has been busy elsewhere but this month he is returning to his 'spiritual home', he tells Peter Crawley
You could understand the slightly shocked laughter during Frankie McCafferty's second trip to the podium at The Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards last February. After all, there is a rather quaint etiquette about black-tie awards ceremonies that suggests it is wrong to steal somebody's prize. But having pocketed Best Supporting Actor for the Lyric's production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, McCafferty suggested that what the absent Best Actor recipient, Richard Dormer, didn't know wouldn't hurt him. Besides, McCafferty explained: "I reckon I could do with the bookends, do you know what I mean?"
It was one of the funniest non-acceptance speeches ever made and it was, of course, an act.
"If I just accepted it on his behalf, they'd have cut it out of the [television coverage]," McCafferty explains shyly, almost guiltily. "So I thought you may as well make a joke out of it. Because pretending that you didn't want it, would be . . . A LIE!"
Like much of McCafferty's recent work, that last trill carries an electric charge of candour and unpredictability. I had been warned that his sly, ironic sense of humour might make for a difficult interview, but McCafferty excels at defying expectations.
Looking far younger than his 38 years, he speaks with an animated jabber, his buoyant Co Donegal tones slowing and swelling into the end of a sentence. An actor, writer and film-maker, he will admit to being naturally quiet, but his wit is quick and sharp.
He will talk urgently about the politics of art - "If you're not trying to somehow reflect what's going on in your world, you're in danger of becoming irrelevant" - then pause to wave superstitiously at a single magpie through the restaurant window: "It takes away the sorrow." His favourite play? Waiting For Godot. His favourite actors? Harpo Marx and Joanna Lumley.
McCafferty may delight in comedy, but like most things he takes it very seriously.
The youngest of six children, McCafferty inherited his mother's passion for old Hollywood movies and eventually accepted his father's advice not to pursue music professionally.
"Music is a young man's game," said his father, a musician of the big band era whose career was sidelined by the dawn of rock'n'roll. "If you're an actor you can be a character actor 'til you're 70."
Despite the encouragement, it wasn't until McCafferty was a student at UCG that he found his inspiration.
"Druid were really on fire at the time, doing Tom Murphy's work," he recalls. "I got a cancellation to see Bailegangaire with Siobhan McKenna, and it cost me a fiver. I remember thinking: 'This should be about a hundred quid, to see actors of this calibre.' I developed this little ambition: I decided that I didn't necessarily want to be an actor, but I wanted to be a Druid actor."
Careful what you wish for - by 1989 he had made his professional debut in Druid's production of Wild Harvest by Ken Bourke, then wondered "what the hell do I do now?". The answer seemed to come in the form of a scholarship to the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris, one of many stops in a disorientatingly peripatetic career of theatre tours and location shooting.
"We were being taught to declaim," he recalls, dropping his chopsticks and springing into an oratory pose. "I kind of liked that. It was totally theatrical."
McCafferty, on the other hand, isn't totally theatrical. This is not simply because his early career moved swiftly into acting for film and television; nor is it because for six years he appeared in every episode of the hugely popular TV series Ballykissangel; nor, strangely, is it because he has directed four short films. Rather it's because he seems to think in pictures.
Playwright Tom Murphy once told him: "If you feel you've got any writing in you, you should write."
At the time McCafferty was writing a movie script. "Why are you writing a film?" asked Murphy.
"Because every time I close my eyes to imagine something I see landscapes and horses galloping over them," McCafferty laughed. Murphy's reply cut him to the quick: "If you can't write for the theatre, you can't write drama."
McCafferty casts his mind back.
"I remember thinking: 'Oh yeah, you're probably right,' he says. "At that time I wasn't 30 yet. I hadn't really got anything to say. Whereas in film the visuals are enough to play with."
He wasn't completely dissuaded, however, and when McCafferty did write for film, adapting the poetry of Ian Kilroy to shoot Brood in 1997, the results were astonishing. A friend and collaborator since their "shambolic student drama days", writer Tim Loane describes McCafferty's first short film as "just magnificent. A very different side to the work you think of from the Ballykissangel comedy actor. It had a serious artistic integrity to it".
Even now, with his latest short, The Devil, in post-production, McCafferty seems entranced by images. Tin Type, his work in progress for the stage, is a one-man show which draws from photography and is inspired by the work of theatrical visionary Robert LePage. It's no wonder that someone of a quiet disposition, entranced at an early age by the flicker of Hollywood movies, should have such a high visual sensibility.
Still, worried about looking like a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, McCafferty considers acting "the shy man's revenge" and his first calling.
"Acting was frowned upon by my school authorities, so it always felt anarchic to me," he says. "When I started a band [before college] I did a lot of Bob Dylan protest songs and that's what I like about the theatre - it can say things that need to be said."
It is tempting, then, to see a political charge to his work. He speaks candidly of how harrowing it became to portray the shell-shocked first World War soldier William Moore in Observe The Sons of Ulster.
"I got quite depressed by it," he says. "Ultimately that was as much about what was happening in the world as anything else. We're doing a play about an ancient war while a new one is taking off."
Asked some months later about his stunning embodiment of John B. Keane's grotesque Dinzie Conley in Druid's recent production of Sharon's Grave (for which he was also nominated at The Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards), McCafferty was wary of playing up any political significance. Could you compare him to a global terrorist, one interlocuter demanded?
"No," McCafferty said. "He's a poor repressed cripple from Kerry with a big twisted hint of depravity."
His questioner persisted: is there a moral we can take from this?
"Well," sighed McCafferty, "I suppose you could say that if you repress people that are crippled already, they will attack you."
I laugh when he tells me this, but just switch on the news and its salience is sobering.
"Those things are woven together in Frankie," says Tinderbox director Michael Duke. "That playfulness and a real sensitivity and seriousness too . . . There's a steel in him and a fair bit of rage as well."
"He's political with a small p," says Loane, who has acted and written with McCafferty and also directed him. "The individual is what interests Frankie about a piece of drama, rather than the political. And like the best actors, that's what he communicates to the audience: the individual struggle, whatever that may be."
McCafferty's sister once asked about his profession and concluded that acting must be hard "because you've got to indulge emotions that other people correctly choose not to". In part, McCafferty sees making films as a way of avoiding the danger of self-exposure and self-obsession; standing behind the camera pulls focus from himself.
"But you've got to remember too that it is a way of losing yourself sometimes," he says.
Next up for McCafferty is Trad, directed by Mikel Murfi, to be staged at Druid Theatre ("my spiritual home") for the Galway Arts Festival.
"It's quite Beckettian actually," he says of Mark Doherty's play, which casts him as the 140-year-old father of a 100-year-old son played by Peter Gowan. "It's about generations and tradition. It's quite comedic - there's plenty of humour in it - but I imagine it's going to be quite stylised in its presentation."
He sweeps aside any notion that he's got it made, though, and points to the bigger picture. "I'm working this hard because I have to," he says. "Generally if you look at theatre, TV and cinema as an industry, it just seems quite depressed, and for actors I think the hardest thing to contend with is not working. If you're a painter and you can't afford a canvas, you can still get some charcoal and paper from somewhere. But if you're an actor and you're unemployed you can't just get up in the morning and go act."
And then he's off, with a pivot of good humour, to chat to fellow actors and to engage in "neurotic" rituals before that evening's performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream for Barabbas. He's full of surprises. Or, as Loane puts it: "There's a sense of unpredictability about what work excites him. You don't know what he's going to do next."
• The world premiere of Trad is a Galway Arts Festival production and runs from July 14th to 25th at Druid Theatre. The festival runs from July 12th to 25th. Details: www.galwayartsfestival.ie