Cillian Murphy soars in Misterman

To describe Cillian Murphy as amazing in Enda Walsh’s one-man show Misterman barely begins to do justice to the actor’s performance.

Misterman is a strange piece of work – its 90 minutes has moments that are comic, tragic and plain mad, with language that is frequently biblical in scale. It’s also very physical and beautifully lit and scored.

The city’s Black Box has been transformed into a warehouse space for the show, in which Murphy as Thomas Magill is recreating scenes from his past as he tries to stop his world from falling apart.

It’s apparent very quickly, despite the quick-fire comedy of the early moments, that he is not a well man and that there will be no happy ending.

Thomas sees himself as a modern day Messiah, in league with God, whose mission in life is to save the inhabitants of the midland town of Innishfree from their sins. The only problem is they don’t want to be saved. They also don’t realise quite how mad he is and that mistake is fatal.

Thomas lives with his mother, who has a penchant for Jammie Dodger biscuits, and their cat, whose kittens he has recently drowned for what he regards as humanitarian reasons. His father, who owned the local shop, has died recently and Thomas feels the loss greatly.
At first he seems pretty harmless, but as he recreates conversations he has with his neighbours, you realise he is a zealot.

He impersonates many of his neighbours, effortlessly skipping from one character to another. His recreation of the local vamp, Mrs Cleary is great and evokes memories of Breakfast on Pluto.

Cillian Murphy’s physicality and his intensity as he moves through the events that have brought him to this warehouse are amazing. There are moments when he barely moves, moments when he can’t stand still and at one point when he is cowering during a beating from an irate neighbour, it’s difficult to believe that he is the only person on stage. That’s not the only moment when you believe that there’s a host of villagers alongside him. He finds ‘an angel’ Edel – voiced by Alice Sykes – with whom he falls in love and dreams of their bright new future. His language becomes highly poetic and as he tells her of the Eden he is planning, and asks if he can hold her hand, you can sense her presence.

In addition to his impersonations, Thomas recreates ‘conversations’ with his mother and his neighbours, courtesy of a series of reel to reel tape recordings he has made of them.

MISTERMAN IS SOLD OUT!

JULY 07 19.30 Black Box Theatre   JULY 08 19.30 Black Box Theatre   JULY 09 19.30 Black Box Theatre JULY 10 18.00 Black Box Theatre JULY 11 20.00 Black Box Theatre
(SOLD OUT) JULY 13 19.30 Black Box Theatre
(SOLD OUT) JULY 14 19.30 Black Box Theatre - SOLD OUT JULY 15 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 16 15.00 Black Box Theatre JULY 16 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 17 18.00 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 19 19.30 Black Box Theatre JULY 20 19.30 Black Box Theatre SOLD OUT JULY 21 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 22 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 23 15.00 Black Box Theatre JULY 23 19.30 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT) JULY 24 18.00 Black Box Theatre (SOLD OUT)

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Stage Struck

THE GOOD news about Cillian Murphy in Landmark’s production of Misterman is that he delivers nothing short of a virtuoso performance. The more sobering fact is that the ravenous demands of the huge-scale solo show mean that anything less would be considered a failure.

Murphy has to negotiate Enda Walsh’s tumultuous text, thick with verbiage and voices. He has to fill a cavernous space, starkly designed as an industrial wasteland scattered with battered props, using his presence and hyperkinetic physicality alone. And he has to hold an audience in a perfect suspension of empathy and revulsion for a deeply troubled character. There is strength in numbers, but here nobody will do it for him.

In one respect, at least, Murphy is not alone. A single file of solo performances is quickly coming to define the current moment in Irish theatre.

Also at the Galway Arts Festival, the mesmerising Eileen Walsh performs in Corcadorca’s Request Programme , an entirely silent show in which the audience follow Walsh through her flat, watching mutely as she performs her post-work rituals. We piece together her story from scant but detailed clues (obsessively cleanly, she leaves behind few existential fingerprints).

Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1970s play has been transplanted from the disenfranchised German working class to a materially

and spiritually bankrupt contemporary Ireland, there is something more cruel in Walsh’s lack of support. We watch her hopes flicker and her distress grow in obedient silence, and even as we empathise we do nothing to intervene. We leave feeling complicit and exposed.

Elsewhere Pat Kinevane performs his one-man show, Silent, for Fishamble, in which a homeless man tells an artfully fragmented story of silent movies and splintering mental health. Barabbas’s similarly themed City of Clowns finds Raymond Keane struggling with his solitude, while the action-movie bustle of Corn Exchange’s Man of Valour increases the attention that it’s a solo run for Paul Reid.

Fleet-footed and easily revived, the solo show is, for better or worse, the epitome of theatrical individualism. Nothing distracts you from the performer’s self- reliance or bravura resilience, a condition that can appear either brave, vain or downright lonely. But even as you applaud the achievement of these actors, the dramas themselves don’t portray their characters’ isolation as anything other than calamitous.

The irony of these solo performances is that they exist to be shared. Products of our divisive recent history, they are both created by and reflective of the polarising effects of greed and fear, the limitations of straitened times. But in the communal space of the theatre, they also offer an antidote: an arena of empathy, different perspectives, debates and collaboration. In short, a model society.

We enter the world alone, we leave it alone, but, paradoxically, the solo show reminds us that we’re in it together.

Michael Fassbender has joined Brendan Gleeson’s directorial debut At-Swim-Two-Birds.

Michael Fassbender has joined the already killer cast of Brendan Gleeson’s directorial debut At-Swim-Two-Birds.

Gleeson revealed the news to Screen Daily, with the X-Men: First Class star committing to the period drama, an adaptation of Flann O’Brien’s 1939 novel.

Fassbender will star alongside Gleeson, Gabriel Byrne, Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy and Domhnall Gleeson (Brendan’s son). Funding is still coming together, with an aim to shoot spring 2012.

A passion project for Gleeson, he acquired the rights seven years ago and has been been plotting production for the last four years. The story follows an Irish student who populates his creative writing with characters from his own life.

Gleeson Snr will next be seen in the critically acclaimed The Guard, alongside Don Cheadle. He also has Albert Nobbs and Safe House coming up. Meanwhile, his new star Fassbender is currently filming Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, and has Jane Eyre and A Dangerous Method due for release.

Cillian Murphy: A perfect level of fame?

‘Inception’ star Cillian Murphy tells Anita Singh how he treads the fine line between Hollywood glitz and his roots in County Cork.

The figure ambling towards me down a sunny street in Kilburn, north London, doesn’t look like Cillian Murphy. He is sporting a new beard of Captain Birdseye proportions and wearing sunglasses that hide his most distinctive feature. For it seems the world has fallen in love with Murphy’s eyes – there is even an entire website dedicated to their extraordinary shade of blue.

Nor is this rough-and-ready neighbourhood of kebab shops and old-man pubs the sort of place you’d expect to find an actor whose last film, 2010’s Inception, took more than £500 million at the box office and who has just shot a thriller with Robert De Niro. Yet it is where this Hollywood star has chosen to call home.

Murphy moved here from his native County Cork a decade ago and never left. “When we arrived this was where we sort of landed, we got a flat here and just got used to it,” he says cheerfully. “I rarely visit the West End.”

We meet around the corner from the home he shares with his wife, the artist Yvonne McGuinness, and their two sons, aged four and six, in the theatre where he is rehearsing Misterman, a one-man play written and directed by fellow Irishman Enda Walsh. Debuting at the Galway Arts Festival this week, it is an intense and unsettling study of psychosis, shot through with black humour. Getting inside the role has been all-consuming (and not just because it required a beard).

“It is haunting my dreams and just taking over,” he says. “I adore that sort of immersion in work. It’s all you think about and all you live and breathe, and to me that’s more exciting than popping in to play a cameo in a film or something.”

His first stage role in five years features the dense monologuing that is Walsh’s hallmark and requires Murphy to be on stage alone for nearly 90 minutes. It is a daunting prospect. “All the actors I’ve talked to who’ve done one-man or one-woman shows say it’s like the Everest of acting,” he says, “but when you scale it – if you scale it – then it is so satisfying for you and for the audience.”

Misterman, which Walsh jokily describes as “Ballykissangel through the veil of absinthe”, is set in a rural Ireland far removed from the tourist brochures. “We’re pulling the lid off that so-called pastoral Irish utopia,” says Murphy. “It doesn’t exist, really. I think everybody is very aware of what state the country is in. But Irish people are great at sending themselves up and Irish writers have great fun exploding the stereotype.”

The pair go back a long way: Walsh gave Murphy his first professional acting role in a Cork production of Disco Pigs in 1996 and they have been friends ever since. “I was just 20 and it changed everything for me. At that time I was a nobody off the street.”

Murphy secured an agent, junked law school and his career took off. He made his screen breakthrough in Danny Boyle’s 2002 zombie movie 28 Days Later and since then the work has come thick and fast. He has mixed low-budget indies (The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Breakfast on Pluto) with Hollywood. “It’s nice to do a film like Inception where everybody in the world sees it, pretty much,” he says, “but it’s also nice to do a little film.”

If there is a pattern to Murphy’s work, it is his tendency – from 28 Days Later to Sunshine (Boyle’s 2007 space thriller) and Wes Craven’s Red Eye – to play characters trapped in nightmarish scenarios. “I’m attracted to the idea of regular people in extraordinary situations,” he says. “I’m very interested in what pressure does to the mind – fight or flight, collapse or keep going? – and dramatically there’s a lot to be mined there.”

A critic once described him as “a character actor trapped in a leading man’s bone structure”. Murphy laughs then reddens with embarrassment when asked if his looks have helped or hindered his career. “Obviously, in this business, there’s a huge part of it that’s about appearance, but I’ve never found it to be limiting and I’ve never found it to be a foot in the door.”

Does he think of himself as a leading man? He pauses for thought. “I think labelling is limiting. Sometimes playing the supporting parts is great, and the size of the role shouldn’t determine how interesting it is.” A case in point: Murphy auditioned for Christian Bale’s role in Batman Begins but got the smaller role of the Scarecrow, and was quite content.

Now 35, he has no desire to move to Los Angeles. “I’ve never considered it. I very much consider myself European. I think if you go and set up shop in Hollywood, you’ve nailed your colours to the mast a little bit in terms of the work you want to do. And that’s great, you know, but I like to mix it up. I like going there to work, I enjoy the weather and the food and everybody’s so positive, but I couldn’t live there. It would wear me down.”

In London he is approached by fans “occasionally, but never in a way that’s invasive or annoying. I get the Tube every day and buy my socks in Gap and all of that stuff.” And he still gets star-struck, not least when he found himself working alongside De Niro on the forthcoming Red Lights. He plays a professional sceptic trying to debunk De Niro’s famous psychic. “Oh, I was so nervous, incredibly nervous,” he recalls of their first meeting. “That’s a dream come true, to think that I would be working with him – and on a film that good.”

I tell him it’s refreshing to meet an actor who appears to have found the perfect level of fame – starring with De Niro but able to stroll unnoticed down Kilburn High Road. “It’s never been a problem for me. I think the boat has sailed for me in terms of becoming a celebrity. And I’m quite happy with that.”

Misterman is at the Galway arts festival (091 566577) until July 24. Red Lights is out next year - Anita Singh

Risk and art go hand in hand, says arts chief

SOCIETY MUST continue to “take risks with art” and allow for failure, which is an integral part of creativity, the Arts Council chairwoman Pat Moylan has said.

Opening the Galway Arts Festival last night, Ms Moylan said that while the economy was “risk averse”, society cannot “turn on and off” its commitment to those who are creative.

“Any time we put an artist in front of a canvas, we don’t necessarily have any guarantees about the result, but this is how art is created – not in a foolproof way, and there is always a risk it won’t succeed,” she said.

“If we don’t continue to fund the arts, we could find ourselves in a few years’ time in an artless society,” she said.

Paying tribute to the Galway Arts Festival for its energy and enthusiasm for “risk”, Ms Moylan noted that the event’s economic value was close to €20 million in 2009, with 190,000 visitors.

“One has to continue to make an economic argument,” she said, but it shouldn’t have to be the case.

Ms Moylan noted NUI Galway’s partnership with the festival this year, through its new volunteer programme involving 10 graduate students.

The selected group have been given passes for shows, post-show talks, workshops and masterclasses, while also assisting organisers as part of a “hothousing” training initiative.

The festival’s opening show last night was the world premiere of Enda Walsh’s Misterman , starring Cillian Murphy, in the Black Box Theatre.

Artists from Africa, North America, Asia, Australia and Europe have been booked for this year’s programme, along with Irish productions.

Highlights include the return of the all-male Shakespeare theatre company Propeller, under the direction of Edward Hall, with a double-bill of Shakespeare’s Richard III and The Comedy of Errors. 

Corcadorca is presenting Request Programme , with Eileen Walsh and directed by Pat Kiernan, in a city centre apartment, while Fishamble Theatre Company is staging Silent by Pat Kinevane in the Druid Theatre.

The Macnas parade, which includes a strong volunteer element drawn from the city populace, takes to the streets next Sunday night from the Spanish Arch – with the title This Fierce Beauty. 

French acrobatic and circus artists Les Philébulistes are also part of the street programme, with Arcane , in Eyre Square tomorrow and Thursday at 2pm and 6pm.

The festival’s extensive visual arts programme opened on Sunday with Hughie O’Donoghue’s The Road . He speaks about his work today at 2pm at the temporary festival gallery in Galway Shopping Centre on the Headford road.

Some 14 separate free art exhibitions, including the work of Charles Lamb in Connemara, are at the Galway City Museum.

Music ranges from Blondie to Afrocubism to Iarla Ó Lionáird and Iris DeMent, and Brassroots, who played at the festival opening last night.

Also opening this week for a fortnight is the Galway Loves Theatre festival at Nun’s Island Theatre.

The concept behind this new event is to allow greater participation by Galway artists, according to director Paraic Breathnach.

Only one of two Galway Youth Theatre submissions to this year’s arts festival was accepted, which effectively meant that the city-owned Nun’s Island venue would have been booked for only one performance a day. It will now present five different productions.

Stage is set for Galway festival fortnight

ACROBATICS AND Afrocubism, Shakespeare and sean-nós are among highlights of the arts fever infecting Galway over the next fortnight.

Joists for the Galway Arts Festival’s big top were already up on the banks of the Corrib last night, while the separate Galway Loves Theatre initiative at Nun’s Island is also aiming to make the most of mixed summer weather.

Enda Walsh’s Misterman, starring Cillian Murphy, has already played to sell-out previews at the Black Box theatre, while the festival’s visual arts dimension opened last night with the unveiling of Hughie O’Donoghue’s new exhibition, The Road.

A “world-class environment” and a “very optimistic, uplifting experience” was how O’Donoghue described the invitation to him to exhibit at a 40,000sq ft temporary art gallery at the former Atlantic Homecare premises at Galway Shopping Centre.

“Homeric in its epic scale, but also in its poetic note of quest,” was how poet and Irish Times managing editor Gerry Smyth described the artist’s new work, a painting in 48 parts, at the centre of the exhibition.

“Hughie has been engaged in an ever-deepening exploration of certain themes, and that exploration is matched by a level of mastery that is evident in the work we see here today,” Smyth said.

“In one of his earliest poems Brendan Kennelly wrote how poetry had been a gift that took him unawares but he accepted it,” Smyth continued.

“When Hughie was handed the gift of his father’s story, those episodes of Daniel O’Donoghue’s wartime experiences, he accepted it, took it on as a significant part of his artistic enterprise. It has become, I think, a great symbiotic relationship between father and son.”

O’Donoghue had recreated the myth of the Odyssey “on his own terms … well, his father’s terms”, and the result was a “compelling narrative with a terrific dramatic structure, reminding us … that Hughie is as much a storyteller as a visual artist”, according to Smyth.

“It is a quality he shares with many great painters from down the ages of the European tradition – Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Géricault.” Comparing his “grandeur of vision” to that of the German artist Anselm Kiefer, Smyth said both connected with “a personal and a wider history”.

“In turning his head to the past and saving what otherwise might be lost to memory, Hughie is also emphasising certain continuities,” Smyth said. “Through this passionate relationship he has established and built up a lexicon of imagery, an architecture of the human spirit in which he combines the lyricism of the poet with the questioning and questing impulses of the thinker,” he concluded.

O’Donoghue is due to speak about his work at a gallery talk at 2pm tomorrow. Four other exhibitions in the temporary gallery space reflect the work of Paul Maye, Billy Cowie, 16 artists marking Year of Craft 2011 in Material Poetry, and the Cause Collective artists who have erected a “truth booth”.

Also participating in the visual arts programme is Aideen Barry with Possession (Bank of Ireland Theatre, NUI Galway) and Jay Murphy with Hydro (Norman Villa Gallery, Salthill).

A number of exhibitions are also taking place at the Kenny Gallery, Liosbán, the Niland Gallery, Merchant’s Road, 126 Gallery and the Galway City Museum.

Speaking last night, arts festival director Paul Fahy appealed once again for the latest temporary gallery to be acquired as a permanent art space for the city.

He noted that The Road is due to travel to Prague after the Galway festival, which runs until July 24th.

Cillian Murphy on Misterman’s ‘amazing immersive experience’

Galway Advertiser, July 07, 2011.

By Charlie Mcbride

Playwright Enda Walsh’s Misterman is one of the hottest tickets at this year’s Galway Arts Festival due in no small measure to the fact it sees Cillian Murphy take a rare break from his film career to ‘tread the boards’ again.

On Monday morning at the Radisson Hotel the duo took part in a press conference to talk about the play which sees them work together for the first time since Disco Pigs. While it has been 12 years since that production was last staged, Walsh and Murphy have remained good friends and live near each other in London.

It was over a sociable drink one evening that Murphy suggested Walsh should revisit Misterman, a play he had initially written as a one-act that he himself performed in 1999.

“I hadn’t done theatre for a while, it’s been five or six years and I was trying to find the right thing,” Murphy says as he talks about the motivation behind doing Misterman. “I’d been to all of Enda’s plays and I kept thinking ‘I wish I was in that’ and it just struck me one day ‘why don’t I just ask him?’

“And working with friends, because you know each other, you can go straight to the work, there’s no getting-to-know-each-other or tip-toeing around, it’s very liberating. That’s what I miss most about theatre, the rehearsal process, that laboratory of throwing ideas around and particularly when you’re in a room with a friend there’s complete ease.”

Murphy expands on what drew him to the play.

“I love Enda’s work first and foremost,” he says. “Any actor saying his words and playing his characters, they’re really challenging, you have to give everything. What he’s digging for are themes I’m very interested in.

“I think this play is about loneliness and guilt and carrying something around with you and the corrosive nature of that and what it does to a person. It’s a really bizarre and non-linear investigation of that.

“Thomas Magill [the play’s protagonist] is a brilliant character, very funny and very loveable but also, as you’d expect from Enda play’s, slightly not all there. And also, it being a one-man show, having not been back in theatre in a while you feel like ‘sure we’ll jump in the deepest end of the pool!’”

Misterman is a dark and blisteringly funny tale of one man, Magill, who is on a self-appointed mission to “do the Lord’s work” in the small community of Inishfree. The play brings us indelible portrayals of the evangelising Thomas and the various townsfolk he encounters throughout his personal crusade.

“Those characters that are on the periphery in small towns interested me,” says Walsh. “He’s massively lonely and also someone you would be unnerved by. I like characters who are on the edge. This is the world he’s built and we’re sitting in it. The play gives you hallucinogenic shards of deepest darkest quiet Ireland.”

Murphy describes the challenge of doing a one-man show.

“In this play it’s not just one character, he peoples the town so you get to play several different characters and that’s always fascinating to do,” he says. “It’s very fast and very intense so it’s an amazing immersive experience and I love that. I love characters and projects that take you miles and miles away from yourself. I like work that’s intense, I think Enda does as well. It involves a lot of commitment.”

Misterman previews from tonight to Monday and then runs throughout the festival from Wednesday July 13 to Sunday 24.

Tickets are available from the festival box office on Forster Street and through www.galwayartsfestival.com and www.ticketmaster.ie

Hollywood star Cillian goes back to his roots

Hollywood star Cillian goes back to his roots

July 8, 2011 - 7:00am

You are friends with people whose work you admire, but it’s rare you work together,” says Cillian Murphy.

The Cork actor whose film credits include Red Eye, 28 Days Later, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Batman Begins and Breakfast on Pluto, is in Galway putting the final touches to Misterman, the flagship show of this year’s Arts Festival which was written and is being directed by his good friend, Enda Walsh.

And certainly, the opportunity for audiences to see him working with Enda is one that has not occurred in over 15 years.

The two became friends in the mid 1990s when a young Cillian – then a UCC law student involved in Cork’s music scene – was offered the role of Pig in Enda’s groundbreaking play Disco Pigs. It changed his life.

“It was the biggest break you can have as an actor,” says Cillian as he and Enda take questions from the press in the city’s Radisson Hotel.
Disco Pigs was produced by Corcadorca Theatre Company and on it, he worked with Enda, actress Eileen Walsh and the play’s director Pat Kiernan. “I have never forgotten that,” he says

Disco Pigs came to Galway during the 1996 Arts Festival and “we had an amazing couple of weeks”, he recalls.

Seven years ago he returned to the city to play Christy Mahon on Druid’s production of The Playboy of the Western World, directed by Garry Hynes, and he has visited the Film Fleadh on various occasions as well.

“I love the place and the audience.”

It’s been six years since Cillian last appeared on stage and he compares his role in Misterman to “jumping in at the deepest end of the theatrical swimming pool. And it’s cold”.

Misterman is a one-man play in which Cillian takes on the role of Thomas McGill, a disturbed loner trying to come to terms with a massive trauma in his life. The action is set in a huge warehouse, where the audience realise that this could be the last hour and a half of Thomas’s life and if he doesn’t keep moving and talking, life will stop.

But while it’s a one-man drama, Cillian plays multiple characters as Thomas recreates conversations he has had with a host of residents of the midlands town of Inishfree, from which he is running away.
The good news for Cillian and for those who’ll be attending Misterman in the Black Box is that while the theatrical swimming pool is cold, “it’s getting warmer”.

The character he is playing is “funny and loveable, but as you’d expect from Enda’s plays, he’s not all there”, according to Cillian.

He and Enda compare the play to the BBC drama series,Ballykisangel – but it’s Ballykisangel gone wrong, with Enda exploding and magnifying “the clichéd Irish social stereotypes … through Thomas McGill’s eyes”, according to Cillian.

“It’s like Ballykisangel in the wrong hands, written by someone who is drinking absinthe,” adds Enda.

There’s an easy familiarity between Cillian and Enda and it’s obvious that they get on famously together. Both are based in London where their families live near each other, and they socialise together regularly.

A couple of years ago Cillian suggested over a pint that they should work together again and mooted revisiting an old play of Enda’s, Misterman.

Enda has written several screenplays, including that for the film Hunger, which won the Camera d’Or in Cannes, but he is probably best known as a playwright. His works include The Walworth Farce, New Electric Ballroom and Penelope – all of which were staged by Druid. He originally wrote Misterman for Corcadorca and took on the role of Thomas McGill when it was first performed in 1999.

It was inspired by the 1994 tragedy in which Clareman Brendan O’Donnell killed Imelda Riney, her three-year-old son Oisín and Galway priest Fr Joe Walsh in Cregg Wood on the Galway-Clare border.

The current production, which according to Cillian, is “almost operatic in scale” is totally different from that 1999 version.

Enda Walsh - Misterman, Cillian Murphy, and the Galway connection

Misterman is a play that’s had a massive effect on everything I’ve written since 1998 - Enda Walsh

By Charlie Mcbride

One of the definite highlights of this year’s Galway Arts Festival is Enda Walsh’s Misterman which sees him reunited with Cillian Murphy for the first time since their feted collaboration on Disco Pigs 15 years ago.

Misterman is a dark and blisteringly funny tale of one man, Thomas Magill, played by Murphy, who is on a self-appointed mission to “do the Lord’s work” in the small community of Inishfree. The play brings us indelible portrayals of the evangelising Thomas and the various townsfolk he encounters throughout his personal crusade.

Speaking ahead of the play’s Galway Arts Festival run next month, Walsh – who also directs the play - talked about the creation of Misterman.

However he began by recalling that earlier landmark staging of Disco Pigs which would prove such a breakthrough in the careers of Walsh and both its cast-members, Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh (who also features in this year’s Galway Arts Festival in Corcadorca’s Request Programme).

“I was really lucky to get these two terrific, enigmatic actors who were both perfect for the kind of energy they brought to their roles,” Walsh tells me. “The chemistry between them was just so right and the play itself just seemed to be the right play for Cork and for the theatre scene at the time.”

Premiering in Cork, Corcadorca’s staging of Disco Pigs had a huge impact on Irish audiences and subsequently toured successfully to Edinburgh, London’s West End, Australia, Canada, and mainland Europe. It set Walsh, Murphy, and Eileen Walsh firmly on the paths to success they have all enjoyed in their careers in the years since. And while they haven’t worked together since, they remain in regular contact and, co-incidentally, all live within 20 minutes of each other in London.

As he explains how the arts festival production of Misterman came about, Walsh reveals that the initial impetus came from Cillian Murphy. The play itself first saw the light of day as a one-act production, which Walsh himself performed for Cordadorca in 1999. This new staging is a substantially re-worked and expanded version of the piece.

“I’ve never revisited any of my plays before,” Walsh reveals, “but Cillian came to me one day about two years ago and said he would really like to perform Misterman. When I looked at it again, I felt there was a lot more I could do with the play. I wanted to delve deeper into Thomas and really crack open the head of this character and all his dealings with issues of guilt.

“Misterman is a play that’s had a massive effect on everything I’ve written since 1998. On the page it seems slim but the world of it, the character’s history, his disturbing psychosis, always felt huge. I suppose now with 13 years’ experience and a little more craft I can see what we missed all those years ago. More than the spine of the original remains but it has been developed much further over the past year.

“Its story travels a more circuitous route than before. There’s none of the rush of telling the story, instead we see the strange detail of what he remembers, of how he has learnt to lie, and how his guilt has shaped his bizarre existence.”

Many of the other characters who feature in the play appear in taped conversations with Thomas which is one of ways in which this version differs from the earlier one, as Walsh outlines.

“The first version was staged much more sparsely than this one is,” he says. “We didn’t use any tapes first time around. This will be much more elaborate, and there will be almost hallucinogenic use of lighting at times. The play is kind of like Disco Pigs in that it portrays a character who basically has arrested development. Thomas is stuck with this simplified catechism view of the world. And Thomas is the kind of guy that if he doesn’t continue on this mission of his he would probably commit suicide. It’s a story that’s crazy and vibrant and sad.”

While Walsh might be associated with his native Dublin, and Cork through his fruitful early association with Cordadorca, recent years have seen him develop a strong, and prolific, affinity with Galway.

Druid has premiered no fewer than five of his plays – Medea, New Electric Ballroom, Walworth Farce, Gentrification, and Lynndie’s Gotta Gun, Galway Youth Theatre have presented Chatroom, Fregoli have staged both Bedbound and Disco Pigs and the Galway Arts Festival has hosted a production of The Small Things.

“I’ve been quite seduced by the city,” Walsh laughs as he considers this remarkable run of Galway productions. “And I’m really looking forward to having Misterman on in the arts festival. I love summertime shows and I love having a play on as part of an arts festival where you can have theatre taking place alongside other artforms.”

Walsh is also effusive in his praise of the creative team who have come together to bring Misterman to the stage.

“We have gathered an amazing creative team including designers Jamie Vartan [set], Adam Silverman [lighting], and Gregory Clarke [sound]. The production will also feature the world premiere of a specially commissioned score by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary composers, and founder of the renowned Crash Ensemble, Donnacha Dennehy. I feel so privileged to be working with them all.

“And in Cillian Murphy we have an actor who has the intensity and courage to push himself to the limit. Working to all our potential I hope and believe we can offer a slice of Ireland and Irish theatre that feels dangerous, deeply unsettling, and challenging for any audience.”

Misterman will run at the Black Box Theatre from Thursday July 7 to Sunday July 24 (excluding July 12 and 18). Tickets are on sale from the festival box office and through www.galwayartsfestival.com and www.ticketmaster ie

Old blue eyes is back on stage

THEATRE: Cork actor Cillian Murphy is not short of strong film roles, but he likes to challenge himself and his audience. That’s why he’s taking to the stage in Enda Walsh’s ‘ Misterman ’ at the Galway Arts Festival, he tells ARMINTA WALLACE 

MEETING CILLIAN MURPHY is weirdly disorienting. He arrives early for the interview dressed in one of those green army surplus jackets that draw absolutely no attention to themselves. He’s softly spoken, polite, and generous with his time. There’s nothing in his conversation or his body language that so much as hints at celebrity.

But when you shake his hand, or look into those baby-blue eyes, it’s “Beam me up, Scotty” time, because that face is just so familiar. And why wouldn’t it be? The past five years have seen him shin up the Hollywood ladder with a succession of highly praised performances in such films as Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Perrier’s Bounty, Red Eye, 28 Days Later, Breakfast on Pluto and Sunshine . If you want to make an interesting mainstream movie these days, Murphy’s name on the cast list appears to be almost obligatory.

What Murphy has come to the Odessa Club in Dublin to talk about, however, is his return to the stage at the Galway Arts Festival in Enda Walsh’s play Misterman . It’s six years since he last appeared in a play – the West End production of John Kolvenbach’s Love Song, directed by John Crowley – and he has been looking for opportunities to tread the boards since. “I tried to put together a couple of things, and the dates didn’t work or the availability didn’t work out,” he says, sinking – disappearing, almost – into an enormous sofa.

How does it feel to be back? He grins. Clearly, it feels good. “I’ve always loved the sort of laboratory-style atmosphere that you get in a rehearsal space,” he says. “Just throwing things up and making a fool of yourself trying things out.”

It was a piece of theatre that started Murphy’s career. In December 1995, as a secondary school student at Presentation College in Cork, he went to see Pat Kiernan’s production of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange at a nightclub in the city.

“I saw it, and I went, ‘This is amazing. I want to be part of something like this, something that exciting, and something that dangerous and visceral and all of those things.’ ”

Until then, he had been intent on a career in music, playing with a band called Sons of Mr Green Genes, whose members were, as their Zappa-esque name suggests, very serious about making it in the rock business.

A Clockwork Orange persuaded him to take theatre just as seriously. “At that time, there was a great arts scene in Cork. Corcadorca were making great work. Pat Kiernan and Enda Walsh were just a really brilliant team. So I happened to walk up at the right time. And Enda gave me an audition for Disco Pigs and, you know, they took a real chance – and it changed my life.”

Walsh’s high-octane two-hander caused a major stir, touring first Ireland, then the UK, Europe, Canada and Australia, to universal acclaim. It earned a coveted Fringe First award at the 1997 Edinburgh Festival.

The way he tells the story now, it sounds inevitable and effortless. In fact, it was anything but. To begin with, when he first read the script, Murphy couldn’t make head or tail of it. “I found it completely impenetrable, yeah. Well, I’d no experience in reading plays or going to the theatre at all. So I didn’t really know how to read a script. And Disco Pigs was really quite dense. Enda had created a new kind of language. So I didn’t really know how to read it, but I sensed that it was challenging, and kind of new, and that there were two parts. And that was a good thing, because I might get one of them. So that was it.

“But when I think of it, they cast some young fella off the street and gave him this big, big role. It was very courageous for them to do that, and I’ve always been very conscious of them taking that leap of faith with me, you know?”

Has he ever asked Walsh or Kiernan what it was they saw in the raw young actor that inspired them to take such a leap in the dark? The blue eyes look horrified. “Nah,” he declares, appalled at the very idea. “It was just a wonderful time. And we were all so young. It was just a good time. I think if you analyse it too much, it sort of loses its sheen or something.” He shrugs apologetically. “I dunno.”

Cut to the present day and there’s no shortage of sheen around Murphy, whose stellar movie career has been mentioned, or Walsh, whose star is on the rise on the US theatre circuit. Which makes it all the more astonishing that they have been able to find time for a theatre project. And Misterman was Murphy’s idea?

“Well, I guess the idea of working together, me and Enda. You see, after that tour of Disco Pigs, we all went off and did our own thing. A couple of years ago, I said ‘why is it that we haven’t worked together again?’ It seems crazy. Me and Enda have been neighbours in London for a long time. I was actively looking for a play, and I was reading plays, and trying to find something to do. And I thought [he clicks his fingers, eureka-moment style] Misterman .”

Walsh performed the play as a one-act, one-man show for Corcadorca in 1999, but it hasn’t been staged since.

“I said, ‘Enda, whatever happened to Misterman ? Would you direct it and I’ll do it?’ He said [Murphy drops his face and shoulders into a perfect picture of mournful reluctance] ‘Oh, I dunno’. But then he said, ‘Look, I’ll rewrite it’.”

The process of reworking it has taken two years and one can only presume that Walsh’s theatrical experience and success over the past decade has resulted in a more substantial, more multi-layered piece of theatre. The central character, 33-year-old Thomas Magill, is now surrounded by a plethora of sophisticated sound effects and a new electronic score commissioned from Donnacha Dennehy.

“For me, it’s a play about guilt and loneliness,” says Murphy. “We’ve changed it structurally. We’ve peopled it a bit more, and we’ve made it about one day in this character’s life that he’s replaying over and over, to try and exorcise it, if you like.”

Does that “we” mean he has had an input into the rewriting process? “We worked together, yeah. But he’s the writer and director, and I’m the actor. That’s the thing about working with a friend. It’s just all about the work. Nobody feels threatened in any way. He’s amazing at problem solving. He’ll say, ‘Right, we’ll just do that’ and because we know each other so well, there’s no ego or posturing.”

Presumably not all directors are like that?

“The best ones are.” Murphy smiles. I wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. He has worked with Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan, Neil Jordan and Ken Loach, but he’s not about to draw up a league table. Is it worse, though, generally, in the movies as opposed to theatre? He nods.

“It can be tricky. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on about being a director, or an actor, or in the public eye or whatever it is. It’s not something that I pay much attention to, but if it ever becomes an impediment to the work, I find it very frustrating.”

The character at the centre of the Misterman maelstrom is a loner who recreates conversations he has had with the eccentric, yet oddly familiar, inhabitants of the small country town of Inishfree, playing them back on his ancient recording equipment. Despite the analogue recorders, it’s a highly contemporary theme for a play written before the heyday of online social networking and ubiquitous connectedness.

The script is also scathingly funny, shocking and, at times, disturbingly lyrical. “Enda’s ability to get inside a character’s psyche, or psychosis, or trauma – whatever it is – is remarkable,” says Murphy. “And of course, he does that through humour, situation comedy and stuff like that. We have exactly the same sense of humour, he and I. But what he’s really going at is something quite profound. That’s why I like his work.”

In its chameleon-like changes of tone and mood, the role is an actor’s dream. “At one point, there’s Thomas doing an impersonation of Mrs O’Leary, who’s doing an impersonation of her son. It’s like, you know, when you do an impersonation of your mammy, and she was exaggerating to illustrate a point. Irish people are very much like that. We’re playing on that a lot.

“The show is also hugely physical, bordering on physical comedy, which is not something I’ve ever done. And so I’ve been watching lots of classic silent film guys and all that stuff. Because film acting is this, mostly [he indicates himself from the neck up] so the use of the whole body to tell a story, as opposed to just your face, Enda’s been really pushing me for that. It’s an aspect of acting that I’ve never explored before, and it’s been very … interesting. It’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do in film, so I’ve been finding that very exciting.”

It has also been a challenge in the sense that Murphy is a self-confessed research freak. Before he shot Sunshine with Danny Boyle, he spent a lot of time shadowing the physicist Brian Cox. He even visited the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Switzerland, not so much to get a sense of the physics as to get under the skins of the people who work there.

“I spent so much time with him I ended up playing a version of him in the film,” he says, admitting with a rueful laugh that science and maths have never really been his thing. “But film is the art of illusion, really, isn’t it? If you look like you know what you’re doing, people will buy it.”

For Misterman , by contrast, he has had to create the character of Thomas from the inside out. “For people who live on the periphery of society, or people who live under intense pressure or have behavioural issues, to them it’s quite normal,” he says. “So I think you just try to normalise it, really. Of course with any character, in my opinion, they won’t exist or connect or people won’t invest in them unless they have some sort of humanity.

“And then the last thing is, you can never judge them morally while you’re playing them. The audience is free to judge them morally, but I can’t.”

On the contrary, he says, his aim is to shake up a few certainties. In this he will be helped by Dennehy’s extraordinarily creepy score. “Atmospheric, is the word I’d use,” Murphy says with an angelic smile. “But definitely, what I’m interested in with this piece is changing people’s perspectives. Never letting them settle down into what’s happening. Constantly shifting it.”

It might be a mantra for Murphy’s film career as well, given the variety of roles he has taken to date. It is a strategy that he intends to maintain as long as he can, despite Hollywood’s tendency to typecast. “The thing is to try not to repeat yourself, to try to challenge yourself. I like transformative things. If there’s a character I don’t think I’m right for, I’ll always say, ‘Can I play him’, because I’ve never done that type of character before.

“Hollywood is very short-sighted in that regard. I mean, it’s the antithesis of being a creative person: if you do one thing well, that’s the thing you continue doing for ever? But no. I think once you explain to them that it’s not really what you want to do, or rather, once you prove to them that you can do something different, then they accept that.”

Behind the angelic smile and the baby blues, Cillian Murphy is clearly an actor with his feet on firm artistic ground.

And yes, they really are that blue in real life.

Landmark Productions and GAF present Misterman at the Black Box, Galway, on July 7th- 24th.

On July 13th, there will be a post-show talk with the actor and the director in attendance. galwayartsfestival.com

Murphy: on screen
 
WHEN HE FINISHES in Galway, Murphy will resume his hectic filming schedule. He will start shooting Wayfaring Strangers with the Irish director Stephen Bradley next month. “We’re gonna make it in France. It’s a French film, effectively, but written and directed by Stephen. It’s set in the second World War.”

But isn’t there a science-fiction film due for release, the one that used to be called Now, and has been renamed In Time? “Oh, yeah. I made that. It’s coming out in October or something.”

So that’s what we’ll see him in next, then? “I presume so,” he says, scratching his head. “In films, the actor is the last to know. You just get a call eventually, saying; ‘Yeah, this will be out’. Or, ‘This will never be out’. So you just have to wait and see.”

How does he go about choosing which role he’ll take on next? “The thing is, you always have to fight for the really great ones. That’s the thing. The ones that you really want, there’s another 50 guys who really want it as well.”

Basically, though, it comes down to the script. “The word on the page. As you get older you get good at reading them, and you begin to understand structure and character. The way I would pick a project is, if it’s not good on the page, you’re never gonna make it brilliant, even with a brilliant director and a massive budget. But if you get a brilliant script and a brilliant director …” He claps his hands. “Then you should be in a good place.”

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