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Hollywood star Cillian goes back to his roots

GalwayNews.ie

8 July 2011

By Judy Murphy

Judy Murphy meets the acclaimed actor prior to his return to the stage in Galway

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.