Irish America magazine is designed for Irish Americans who are interested in understanding their heritage, Irish America features articles on politics, Irish history, culture, business, sports, international news, and interviews with prominent Irish Americans.

Stephen Rea returns to the Abbey stage in a play written for him by Sam Shepard, which will have its American premiere next June. He talks to Mary Pat Kelly about working with Neil Jordan, Brian Friel, Sam Shepard, and Samuel Beckett.

Here they come actor Stephen Rea and playwright Sam Shepard, both at the top of their game, both internationally celebrated, both deeply involved in Kicking a Dead Horse.

Rea began his career at the Abbey Theatre, but it ignited in London at the Royal Court and the National Theatre where he acted in the Irish classics as well as the plays of great contemporary dramatists – Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard. In 1980, he founded the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry with playwright Brian Friel to premiere Translations and present the play throughout the North at a time when audiences there had few chances to participate in any theatrical experience, let alone one so relevant. Rea devoted himself to Field Day throughout the ’80s and early ’90s doing little film work. The major exception was Angel (1982), the start of a collaboration with director and writer Neil Jordan.

It would be Jordan’s film The Crying Game (1992), for which Rea received both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Best Actor, that brought the actor worldwide attention. Hollywood came calling and Rea has appeared in big movies, most recently V for Vendetta and The Reaping, but he continued to live in Ireland where he has lent his talent and prestige to many small, independent films (including Proud, the film I directed about the role of African Americans in World War II) as well as creating a great body of work with Jordan such as The Butcher Boy, Michael Collins, Interview with a Vampire, and The End of the Affair. He also continued acting and directing on the stage in Ireland and London.

Sam Shepard started his career off-off Broadway with plays that woke up the American theater. Major awards came – a Pulitzer for his 1979 play Buried Child, Obies and Drama Circle awards for Fool for Love (1982) and A Lie of the Mind (1985) and critical and popular acclaim for True West (1984). Shepard, like Rea, made movies, as a screenwriter on Paris, Texas and Robert Altman’s Fool for Love, and as an actor in films such as The Right Stuff, Resurrection, Steel Magnolias and The Pelican Brief. Like Rea, he continued to work in the theater – writing and directing new plays even as his work entered the canon and he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.

And now with Kicking a Dead Horse, both men have chosen to return to the essentials of drama – an actor, a stage, a passion. Shepard wrote this scathing, funny, sad look at a middle-aged man of wealth who tries to find solace in his cowboy roots only to . . . But enough. I mustn’t give it away because the play is coming to New York next summer. It engaged Irish audiences in its world premiere on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre in March and April and returns to the Abbey main stage this September.

Rea welcomed me to his home outside of Dublin where he talked about how the play (which Shepard wrote for Rea), has allowed him to reconnect to the theater.

– Mary Pat Kelly

Tell me about Field Day.

The Field Day Theatre Company was an incredible context for me. It meant I could express myself not just as an actor but as a kind of cultural activist. Before Field Day I had acted at the Abbey and then, in the mid-’70s, I went to London. I did Playboy of the Western World and The Shaughraun at the National Theatre. I also did O’Casey’s Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars. It’s interesting that they happened at a time when the context was very antagonistic to the Irish. And, well, the Irish were very antagonistic to the context.

What was audience reaction?

They were delighted with Playboy. Probably because they couldn’t see any broader context to it. And they seemed quite happy to cheer on the Fenian hero of Boucicault’s Shaughraun. They didn’t seem to relate it to IRA activities that were going on at the time. It was a weird kind of thing. The English have a very funny attitude toward Ireland. There’s a kind of inability to see certain parts of history – it’s as if it never happened – but also the inability to get over it.

So Field Day must have been very different.

Yes. And I needed that. I was a young Irish actor in London playing leading roles on the English stage. I truly loved it and I still, to this day, have a sense of camaraderie with all the actors that I knew at the Royal Court Theatre. It was a bedrock of incredible talent. But at that time in England there began a new appraisal of theater practice. It wasn’t actor centered anymore. It became about an academic understanding of theater. This broke a tradition that went back to Shakespeare – Laurence Olivier used to say that he had an unbroken link to Burbage – but now there was a theoretical approach as opposed to having theater in the hands of people with a practical understanding of it.

It was happening in Ireland too. The Abbey company was disbanding. The concept of a production was central, not the performance. So when Brian Friel and I came together in 1980 we wanted to balance the intellectual with the practical. We had the big intellects on board, Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney, but Brian and I had practical experience in the theatre. That was very important.

Brian Friel is completely in touch with the psyche of the nationalist people.

He writes from that understanding. Translations received an amazing response first in Derry and then in country towns throughout the Six Counties. The audiences really knew what it was about. It was about them. It was very exciting. The plays were also an invitation to look beyond experience.

I remember that Gerard McSorley was in the third production, Communication Card. We were in Maghera in County Derry and he was eating his Chinese meal at 6:30. He looked up to me and said, “I don’t know what we’re doing here” and I said, “You’ll see.”

The audience was amazing, and afterwards he said to me, “Now I see.”

Having the audience as a context like that, so much a part of the work you are doing, is unique. It must have been what the Abbey was like in the beginning.

We brought Brian’s Making History to Dungannon. The play is the story of Hugh O’Neill, the Irish chieftain who the English made the Earl of Tyrone. Dungannon was his seat of power and the audience there laughed at things because they knew them to be true. Four hundred years is not such a long time. There was a throwaway line about the Quinns and Devlins fighting that got roars of laughter because the audience knew the Quinns and Devlins were still at it.

You played Hugh O’Neill.

Yes. It was a difficult role for me. He was a man poised between two cultures – [a character that was] hard to write and hard to act. Hugh O’Neill was supposed to speak with a very English accent. Today, that means a certain southern English received pronunciation and accent, which is not at all the robust way the English spoke at the time of Elizabeth the First. Hiberno-English is closer to Shakespeare, which is why I think Irish people can do Shakespeare very well, but in the play I was supposed to have this upper-class accent and I found I had difficulty retaining my Irishness while playing Hugh. It was, of course, emblematic of everything I felt about my career. I didn’t become an English actor because [if I did] I couldn’t remain myself. It was different in End of the Affair where I played an English civil servant. Part of that character is based in the frozen parts of the language, and I was able to do that. But I couldn’t play Hugh O’Neill with an English accent, I just couldn’t. And it was only a device in the play, because he would have been speaking Gaelic.

Wasn’t it during this period that you did your first movie, Angel, with Neil Jordan where you played a young musician against the background of the Troubles?

Yes. It was a very fortunate accident. I was working full-time with Field Day and was scheduled to appear in Brian Friel’s version of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. But the person that we wanted to direct it didn’t want to do it, and so I directed it. Once the play opened I was free, and that was exactly when Neil was starting Angel. It was fortuitous or serendipity or whatever you call it.

Had you known Neil Jordan?

I had known Neil as a writer. He is a great writer. I think part of the reason why people like his movies is because he structures them like great writing.

In The Crying Game the structure mirrors the movement of the characters and the movement of the ideas. Not very many people can do that – you have to be versed in literature. I did another movie with Neil called Company of Wolves in 1985, but I was really just so involved with Field Day that it was 1992 before I did The Crying Game. But since then I’ve made a lot of movies with Neil.

When The Crying Game was released you were making your Broadway debut in Someone to Watch Over Me. You received Oscar, Golden Globe and Tony nominations for Best Actor in 1992. What was that like?

That was unique. I was unknown in America. Then I had what they call a double-whammy. Suddenly people knew who I was, and I was immensely grateful for that. I’ve always found that American audiences are more sympathetic than English ones. They get it.

When did you discover you were an actor?

You don’t really discover you’re an actor; it’s something you have. It’s the kind of imagination you have. You read literature and you see it dramatized in your head.

I’ve been acting for a long time now and sometimes you don’t feel as close, but I’m beginning to feel close again. Context is important. My context as an actor was Field Day and Derry. It was where I had my two feet on the ground, knew where I was at, and had my head in the right place. And I felt the same thing in New York.

Why do you think that is?

Van Morrison used to always say that he went to London and nothing really happened, and then he went to America and it all happened. It’s partly about how you are in the culture.

As much as I enjoy my work on the English stage and my sense of companionship with theater people in London, they hold you at arm’s length. You’re the subculture. They don’t mind you being Irish as long as you pretend you’re English and totally compromise your Irishness. New York was different. It felt like home. And, it still does. And that’s why I’m looking forward to doing this play at the Public Theater next year.

The perfect segue. So let’s talk about Kicking a Dead Horse, the play Sam Shepard wrote for you. How did it come about?

Fiach Mac Conghail, who is the artistic director of the Abbey, is now focusing on the people who do it – the actors. He’s fixed the auditorium, made it wonderfully intimate. I stood on the stage next to him – he was very nervous about it – and he said, “What do you think?”

I said, “You’ve handed the power back to the actor.” Because you can really act on that stage now: It [the new auditorium] was like physical evidence of something that was being attempted.

Fiach wanted to do all of Sam Shepard’s plays. I’d worked with Sam. He directed me in Geography of a Horse Trainer, which had its world premiere in London at the Royal Court, and I was in several of his plays – Action at the Royal Court and Buried Child and Killer’s Head at the Hampstead Theatre. I directed a play of his called Little Ocean, while Sam was still living in London.

Fiach was having meetings with Sam and they talked about me. Sam said, “Why don’t I write a play for Stephen?”

What was it like working on Kicking a Dead Horse?

It was great. I felt connected to theater in a way I hadn’t for some years. The Abbey has been transformed, and I feel that it’s the place to be. It was fantastic to spend four weeks with Sam, he and I alone in a rehearsal room. It was like real work again, you know, real work.

Was it demanding?

Incredibly. Particularly because we were doing something for the first time. Even the text was developing. Sam was changing things all the time. I knew all my lines on day one. I had to have the text memorized. I couldn’t be learning it as we were rehearsing. But then, of course, it just kept changing. I really started to learn about it [the play] when we opened. That’s the way it works. Doing it at that heightened level of concentration that the performance gives you is when you really learn it.

Irish audiences aren’t always sure what Kicking a Dead Horse is about, because it’s about America. American audiences will get it intuitively, through osmosis as well as through the intellect. They’ll get that it’s about them and about the failure of mythology to sustain people. In this character, Hobart Struther, Sam found the physical manifestation of a man who’s divesting himself of all of the things that he feels don’t mean anything to him anymore.

The published text of the play is dedicated to you.

It’s a huge privilege and an honor for Sam to have written a play for me or, at least, have asked me to be in the first

production. These things are always chemical, you know. We hit it off right from the word go in London. He’s very interested in Beckett and I am too.

I worked with Sam Beckett, and Sam’s overawed by that. Not much gets to him, but it gets to him that I actually worked with Beckett. He can’t believe that he missed that production.

How did that come about?

The Royal Court was going to do a production of Endgame, and had Jack MacGowran been alive, he would have reprised his role as Clov along with Pat Magee, who was the great definitive Hamm, but Jack died when he was making The Exorcist. Jack got me my first role in London. He was kind of a mentor to me. I wrote to him when I first got to London, and he came and met me in this coffee shop on Marylebone High Street. He was playing Seamus Shields in Shadow of a Gunman at the Mermaid Theatre and he offered me the role of Tommy Owens. I said, “Don’t you want me to audition?” and he said, “You are presented with professional credentials.”

So, in 1976, when they were going to do Endgame at the Royal Court I was called in to meet the great Donald McWhinnie who had actually commissioned plays from Beckett. Donald was a BBC producer and when he read Beckett’s novels he said, “Oh I could get a play from this guy.” He knew Beckett before he was a world figure. So there I was with Pat Magee and McWhinnie who had known Beckett from his earliest times. I was in the room with these guys and I was 28, too young for the role. But Donald didn’t audition me either! He just said, “Well, do you want to take this?” “Yeah.” I said. “Why did you think of me?” He said, “Well, I just asked the casting people to get me an Irish actor who was funny.”

Later I got a message from Jack’s widow, Gloria, to say Jack would have been proud. I have an enormous connection to Jack. He was the great transforming Irish character actor. They couldn’t see who Jack was at the Abbey. He was just a funny little character man and he went to England and transformed it all. He went to Paris and studied mime and there he was, the great interpreter of the great dramatist of the 20th century. Jack had it. If you hear him doing Beckett now on recordings, there’s still nothing to touch it. He’s close to the malice and the anger and the frustration that’s at the heart of it all – completely unsentimental.

Didn’t Sam Beckett direct you in Endgame?

Yes. I am fortunate to have been directed by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Sam Shepard – the three defining playwrights of the mid-twentieth century.

What was Beckett like?

Charming. Funny. Only interested in the jokes. Not interested in meaning, just jokes, and structure, structure. The famous thing about Beckett is that he loved this phrase of St. Augustine: “Do not despair. One of the thieves was saved. Do not presume. One of the thieves was damned.”

There’s a reference to the two thieves in Kicking a Dead Horse. Sam said, “Well, Beckett always loved the two thieves.” The influence of Beckett on Sam is a very harmonious one. It’s not strained or contrived.

To be in this play, Kicking a Dead Horse, is to be alive on a stage in great literature. I’ve spent my life doing that. I can hardly believe it. It’s transformative every time you do it. I’ve been in some of the greatest theater literature that has ever been.

When I did the movie Bloom, based on Ulysses, every day I was entering this work of great literature, truly great literature. And that’s a thrill you don’t get in movies very often. You get it in theater a lot if you are doing Chekhov, Friel, Shepard, or Beckett. And I’ve spent my life doing this work.

What sustains you?

I suppose the thing about acting is that it’s so easy to lose faith with something so intangible. It’s so subject to exploitation. But I always liked what Martin Hayes the fiddler said. He’s very much in touch with the old musicians of Ireland that used to just play in houses. They were geniuses, but they didn’t make records. He says, “You have to be very careful when you accept money for anything, because your work becomes dependent. You’re performing for somebody and not just for yourself.” That’s the tension that exists for actors all the time. So it’s a wonderful return for me, to be working with Sam Shepard. The work is so much bigger than any commercial process. Friel’s work is bigger. Beckett’s work is bigger. That’s what sustains you. Kicking a Dead Horse is that kind of work. Though I think sometimes people are most impressed by the fact that you’ve learned all the lines.

Stephen Rea

Stephen Rea returns to the Abbey stage in a play written for him by Sam Shepard, which will have its American premiere next June