By Debbie McGoldrick

Actor Al Pacino paid his first visit to Ireland last week and couldn’t have enjoyed himself more. And it’s highly likely that he’ll be back, given his newest passion, the famed Irish playwright Oscar Wilde.

Pacino is filming a documentary on Wilde called Salomaybe?, based on Wilde’s state of mind when he wrote the play Salome, which Pacino starred in on Broadway some while back.

“I’m ashamed to admit it’s my first time in Ireland,” Pacino told scribes last week. “I’d really love to put on the Salome play here.”

Pacino spent a couple of days at Wilde’s alma mater, Trinity College in Dublin, where he conducted research on the playwright and also received an award from the college’s esteemed Philosophical Society.

“I never thought I would be here at Trinity to receive such an honor and I’m a little bewildered as to what to say,” he told a jammed to capacity audience during the event.

Pacino showed the form that has won him numerous acting accolades, including an Oscar, with a short performance of Herod from Salome. And he said that perhaps someday he would return to Ireland to perform the show at the Gate Theatre, which he also visited. The Gate staged the first production of Salome in 1928.

“Al is completely obsessed with the play. He stood on the stage and saw Bobby Ballagh’s paintings of Wilde,” said the Gate’s artistic director Michael Colgan.

“Al was chuffed with it all and said he’d love to do Salome at the Gate. He put his hands up and said, ‘What a lovely theatre, no wonder people want to work here.’”