In Conversation with Stephen Rea

Luke: Most people will know you through your cinematic persona but you have a considerable pre-history in theater. Maybe you could fill in some of the background, how you found your way onto the stage in the first place in Queen's University in Belfast in the 1960s?

Stephen: I did not do a film until 1982 but I had been acting a long time before that. I started in Belfast and then went straight to the Abbey Theater in Dublin. I did not do a lot of work at Queens, though. I thought everybody at Queens was a dilettante and a charlatan so I did not do much acting at the University.

I was attracted to the Abbey because I was drawn to the theater of ideas but, as we now know, there were none alive in that place at the time. This was in the late 1960s. They then had no particular strategy about how to be a national theater, which is what they were hoping to be. Everything was moribund really and had been for forty or fifty years previously but I was too stupid to realize that before I accepted the job. The first play I did there was called "The Wooing of Duvesa," by M. J. Molloy—an exceptionally underrated writer. It was a typically clumsy and ill-achieved Abbey peasant production. On the opening night, the author was called on stage and he very embarrassedly stood up. It was a play set in the seventeenth century in Ireland. He said: "I wrote this play because I wanted to explore what it would be like living behind an Iron Curtain." That was the first moment that any idea had been proposed to me about what this evening of theater was meant to be. It was a huge breakthrough for me to realize that the author knew what he wanted to do but nobody in the Abbey thought of asking him. So, I hung around for a while and then I went to England.

Luke: Any ideas were suspect in Ireland in the 1960s . . . Was it in England that you got involved with the 7-84 company?

Stephen: My first play in London was a Jack McGowran play—I talk to young actors now who have no idea who he was. Beckett loved him and he appeared in many of Beckett's plays. McGowran made Irish character acting into something bigger. He gave me my first job in London. Jack was too crazy to call a father figure, but he was a lovely man who was very good to me. I was highly influenced by him. Then I got involved with what was called Fringe Theater. I did a lot of fringe work with 7-84. They were named from the fact that 7 percent of the population owns 84 percent of the wealth, which was the statistic in Britain at the time. If they were American, they'd have to be called 1-99. I did work that was very influenced by LaMama, Grotowsky, Tom O'Horgan (who was responsible for the musical "Hair")—all the American physical theater stuff that happened in the 60s, which I found more liberating than the English literary theater.

Kevin: Did you work with Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett at that stage as well?

Stephen: Eventually I worked with Samuel Beckett and also with Harold Pinter. Jack MacGowran comes in there too. When Jack died, they were doing a production of Endgame in which Jack had appeared with Patrick Magee, another very great actor who young people have not heard about. He was from County Armagh; Beckett adored him, and wrote "Krapp's Last Tape" and "That Time" for him, because he so appreciated his voice. Magee had a very actorly, distinctive voice, which he had assumed when he was touring with Anew McMaster. He found a...