Actors have often been heard to complain, with some justification, that their creative art is underestimated when people talk or write of theatre. Certainly in recent decades more attention has been paid to authors and directors than to performers - regardless of the evident triangularity of creative purpose between author, actor and audience in live theatre - when significant assessments are published of the state of the collective dramatic art. Perhaps it is inevitable, given the ephemeral nature of live performance, that actors are sometimes given a lesser place than they deserve in those assessments, but every now and again an actor makes so indelible a mark on the art of drama that the place of the performer cannot be gainsaid.
Yesterday, Dublin, Ireland and the world lost such an actor when Donal McCann died at the devastatingly early age of 56 in what should have been only the middle of a powerfully affecting career. His friends had known for more than a year that he was lethally ill, despite what had seemed to be a rally some months ago. But they, no less than his legion of admirers literally around the world, have been left distraught by his departure. A void has been opened by the realisation that his last great performance was given two years or more ago and that its like will not be seen again simply because a great actor is gone from among us.
Donal McCann was, without question, a great actor by world-wide standards, greatly admired by other actors in Britain, America and around the globe and greatly loved and admired by his fellow-artists in Ireland. He was never pretentious, never unnecessarily flamboyant and never flippant about his work. He used to describe that work as "part-time", perhaps because, alarmed by what he perceived as his responsibility towards the talent he had, he took quite long absences from it. But when he was working on his art he worked more than full-time, investing his characterisations with every fibre of his physical being and every ounce of his brain and even his soul. He was one of those actors for whom the act of creation resulted in performances in which his audience could know his thoughts and experience his feelings just through his physical presence on stage.
He was probably the best Irish actor of this century, and maybe ever. He was among the best actors in the world - a status ecstatically conferred upon him by audiences and critics in London, New York and the other cities in which he played - yet he always returned to his native Dublin where his father, John J McCann, had been a TD and was twice Lord Mayor, as well as penning some minor but highly popular plays which Donal vigorously defended. His characterisations in Sean O'Casey's plays were definitive, not least his Captain Boyle in Joe Dowling's production of Juno and the Paycock for the Gate Theatre in the 1980s. But he also created the definitive performance of the complex Frank Hardy in Brian Friel's Faith Healer, as well as providing a small host of significant characterisations in that author's earlier and subsequent work. His final great performance was as Thomas Dunne in Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom which played to huge acclaim in London, Dublin and New York.
He was seen on television (Strumpet City and The Pallisers come to mind) and in films (The Dead most notably, and many more besides). But his greatest powers were somehow reserved for the live stage where he gave his all. He claimed no great ambition to become a "star". He saw himself as having a vocation in his "job". And he became great. Irish and world theatre has suffered an irreplaceable loss.