The malleable Macbeth has had many incarnations: a drug dealer, a Polish soldier, even a toy in on recent production. For Jimmy Fay’s production at the Abbey the “angle” is a psychological thriller, rooted in Ireland during Cromwell’s time. Such a historical context could add an intriguing resonance to Macbeth’s eventual isolation in an alien-seeming landscape where both heaven and nature are “troubled with man’s act”.
The character of Macbeth dominates the play to a great extent, with the final acts a template depiction of the last days of a tyrant, the bunker mentality and paranoia of a doomed regime. But until Act III the Thane of Fife is in turn dominated, by his wife. If the play is a tragedy of the imagination, of Macbeth’s fateful propensity to foresee results in a way that tempts his actions to be merely faits au accomplis, it is his wife that indulges this in him, latching onto the witches prophesies, questioning his manhood, goading him on.
Playing the spur to prick the sides of Macbeth’s intent is Eileen Walsh, opposite Aidan Kelly. It’s a pairing of two actors at the top of their respective games, and it won’t be the first time they’ve played a dysfunctional couple. “We did Terminus [Mark O’Rowe’s play] and Eden [Declan Recks’s film adaptation of Eugene O’Brien’s play], as well, so there’s a great ground work done already. You can cut straight to that ‘are you a man?’ stuff, get straight in there,” Walsh says in a break from rehearsals. “We do have a good chemistry there and we do enjoy working together. The first week of rehearsal can be wasted just getting to know each other but we jump that and get straight in.”
Walsh appeared in Corcadorca’s 2005 production of The Merchant of Venice, which moved through Cork city to finish in the Court House on Washington Street; but she points to O’Rowe’s rhythmic rhyming couplets as good preparation for speaking Shakespearean verse. “I definitely say ‘screw your courage to the sticking place’ in it at some point. He’s got an amazing way with words and a great musicality. But I think an Irish accent lends itself to Shakespeare. There’s real meat in it, each sentence is a beautiful piece. But this play has always been one of his most accessible and the version we are doing is really pared down. A lot of the time you have all these sword fights and bearded man running hither and tither: you know, who’s the king again?” But Fay’s production, she says, will be rather like the set: “really epic, but not over-propped. It’s very simple.”
Simple is not a word that could describe Walsh’s career, even though it seemed that way at the very beginning, with Disco Pigs. Having seen her in Gina Moxley’s Danti Dan, Enda Walsh asked his namesake to be in his new play alongside Cillian Murphy. Walsh was studying Drama in Trinity College at the time. After swiftly attaining cult status in Cork, the show went on an acclaimed world tour. “We had no idea at that point,” Walsh recalls. “Massive success? We thought, look, we’re brilliant, of course this happened for us. You don’t appreciate it at the time because you think it happens for everybody. Now after being in the business a bit longer, I think, oh, that world tour, all those award nominations, it’s so exiting to have happened. But it was good to go through it without any foreknowledge.”
Disco Pigs was a formative experience in other ways too: “Enda, Cillian and I all met our partners on Disco Pigs, we all got married around the same time and we all have kids the same age, and we all live in the same part of London and use the same child-minder! Really odd!” Walsh met her husband, sculptor Stuart McCaffer, during the play’s Edinburgh run. He worked in a barber’s shop and gave her a haircut. “Before I knew it, I was moving in,” she says. Walsh lived in Edinburgh for 10 years, “not doing much theatre”. She worked with English touring company Paines Plough and appeared in Peter Mullen’s The Magdalene Sisters in 2002 and in RTE’s Pure Mule in 2004, but it was never a case, she says, of skipping from one job to the next. Also during that time she had to deal with the disappointment of not being cast in Kirsten Sheridan’s film of Disco Pigs. She’s philosophical about it: both Elaine Cassidy and Cillian Murphy had film experience that helped them “green light” the project. “It was a good knock to get early on. You know it’s not as easy as it can be for other people,” she concludes.
Her toughest time as a professional was around 2007. “I turned 30 and I had been out of work for a year and I just thought, no, I can’t do this. I thought, you can’t be unemployed and have kids. That’s not how it works. But in the middle of that Saved [Edward Bond’s play, notorious for its scene of infanticide] came up at the Peacock.” It proved a well-named play for Walsh, who since then has won an Irish Theatre award for best actress with Terminus, and a Tribeca Film Festival best actress award for Eden. “When I came back here it began to take off for me again. I didn’t feel I wasted anything, or I had waited for anything. The work I did away was with quality directors. I think age-wise I was lucky to come back at a good point for the parts that were going at the time.
“Sometimes you can do big projects and get kudos, but nothing follows it. That’s how it’s worked for me. So you have to play the long game. I get meaty roles but it doesn’t mean you’re tripping along to the next one. I don’t know what I’m doing next, for instance. It’s scary, but it’s worth it worth you’re in it. There’s a lovely thing of just coming in, those four weeks in rehearsal are beautiful. And bringing that into the theatre is just bringing it into a bigger room.”
Acting, then, is a beautiful profession – but it is not a relaxing one. An image that will stay with this writer was spotting Walsh from the Luas, during the run of Terminus, walking into the Abbey at a fair clip almost fretfully glancing at the script in her hand, chanting to herself. “I get caught doing that all the time. But especially with Terminus, it was so hard. It was rhyming couplets, and it was the fear of forgetting what the rhyming word was. That would throw you off rhythm, you’d lose your place, the audience would know you fucked up, so it was a very scary play,” says Walsh. “I go running quite a bit and I can still recite Terminus because I used it as my metronome. The fear of forgetting was so strong that it’s completely ingrained in my brain.”
When not reading and rereading the script, Walsh adds as much background researcg as she can. For the role of “Lady M”, as she calls it, this includes reading up on Elena Ceauşescu, wife of the Romanian dictator. “I was fascinated that someone could bend the truth so much because she wanted so desperately to be where she was. And Dr Faustus is very important: the pact with the devil and all that. To deliver a line like ‘Hell is murky’ you need to know where your hell is. You can only be in it making good decisions by having the information. You start to see all around you things that remind you of what you’re working on. You’re brain is opened up to these correspondences.” That both Dr Faustus and the Ceauşescus are relevant neatly captures just why we keep turning to Shakespearean tragedy: in them is human nature writ large. And in Walsh Irish theatre has a talent writ large.
Macbeth previews at the Abbey Theatre from tonight and runs from April 7 – May 15, with schools matinees; www.abbeytheatre.ie
