Stage fright, doubt, disenchantment – an actor's life is notoriously complicated, and for Owen Roe, there came a point where he just felt like giving up. But he simply wasn't able to walk away, writes SARA KEATING

A FEW YEARS ago, Owen Roe decided he would never act again. He made his decision at the end of an intense year of back-to-back acting jobs, and he was exhausted. “The thing was,” he says, “I was also broke. Totally broke. I mean, this sort of a job, this sort of a life, for an actor, it’s not about the money. But when you put everything into it and you can’t afford to pay your bills . . . well, I was totally disillusioned, I had just had enough.”

Roe’s disenchantment was a feeling mirrored by many other actors at the time, a general climate of frustration about the impossibility of an actor’s life when weighed against the practicality of needing to make a living. “There was an Equity meeting about it,” says Roe, “and there was lot of anger. Irish actors working in Ireland were being paid less than American and English actors being brought in for a job. There was this pecking order and we were being put at the bottom.

“We felt there was real injustice, and I suppose I thought that there was no point anymore. Nothing was going to change. If you asked, most actors they would tell you that they don’t feel very empowered. We don’t control when and how we work, we have to be asked. For me, it just came to boiling point.”

Roe’s determination to “retrain, maybe, find something else” didn’t last long. “I spent six months thinking about what else I might do and I couldn’t figure it out. I would wake up in the morning and there seemed to be no horizon, there was nowhere for me to pitch myself, but there is only so long you can spend painting the kitchen, cutting the grass, deluding yourself. I suppose what [the break] made clear to me was that there was nothing else I could do. And if you asked most actors, they would say the same: you do it because you have to do it.”

Growing up on Camden Street, the son of a truck-driving father and a mother who worked at the Jacob’s biscuit factory, the recent “career break” is not the first time Roe has been forced to question his vocation. “My parents wanted me to train as an accountant or an architect or something – and that’s what many of my friends from [Synge Street] school went on to do. And when I left school, I did all sorts of jobs – working in warehouses, distribution. But I didn’t really have any focus until I decided that acting was what I wanted to do.

“My parents were worried that it wasn’t a stable job, that I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to get by. I suppose they thought I’d get over it.” They were wrong.

Indeed, it was his mother's passion for the cinema that inspired Roe's desire to act. "I used to go to the movies with my mother every day when I was a kid," he remembers. "We'd alternate between the Deluxe on Camden Street and the Grafton Cinema, depending on what was on, and the only day we wouldn't go was Saturday. We'd watch anything. My favourites were anything with Rock Hudson or anything like Madame X. We weren't very discriminating."

In 1979, Roe joined the Brendan Smith academy to train as an actor. But it was his early work with small theatre companies such as Wet Paint which were really crucial to developing his craft. “We learned what we could and couldn’t do in these smaller shows, on the fringes, where you could get away with it,” he says. “It is something that I worry about when I see young actors coming out from drama school and heading straight to the main stage. You should make your big mistakes in smaller venues, when there is not that much at stake.”

Working with smaller companies also meant that you understood the mechanics of the theatre better, Roe explains. “If it is a new play especially, you are working with it on the floor, contributing to it, improvising. There is a bigger picture than the role you play.”

He cites his experience with the premiere production of Dermot Bolger's The Lament for Arthur Clearyin 1989 as a key moment in his growth as an actor and the big break in his career. "We would spend the day working on material, improvising, developing Dermot's ideas and then he would decide what was useful and he would go away to write. We learned so much about the structure of a play, what dramatically worked and didn't in that rehearsal room. And as an actor I felt it really allowed me to show people what I could do. Since then I haven't really stopped working." Until that infamous career break.

Since returning to the stage after his re-evaluation of the actor's life, Roe has played some of the most challenging roles of his career. In the past 10 months, he has played the terrifying and charming charlatan Frank Hardy in Brian Friel's Faith Healer, a pathological manipulator of the truth driven by a deep psychological doubt of his own. He has played the blind, despairing Hamm in Beckett's Endgame, who sees through to the rotten core of the world despite his visual debility. Hamm, he says, was the hardest role he has ever played. "I won't say that I didn't enjoy it – and I'll be going back to do it again when we go on tour – but it was really tough, because I couldn't see the audience at all and that for an actor is the most terrifying thing, because that is what you are there to do, to communicate with the people sitting in front of you."

He is currently rehearsing for another challenging role, the domineering patriarch Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a man torn between belligerence and uncertainty in his relationship with his son.

“It is a tough part, technically and emotionally,” he says. “There are the rhythms of the language, which have their own demands,” and the “complexity of the character”. “On the one hand, he is trying to connect with his son, even though he has left it so late, he wants to impart something to him before he dies.”

As opening night looms, Roe admits he still suffers from stage fright. “You’ll be waiting in the wings and you’ll have this terrible fear, your mouth will go all dry, you can’t remember your first line, and you’re literally praying that the theatre will burn down so you won’t have to go on.”

It is a horrible feeling as he describes it, but a necessary one. “The nerves keep you ready, and once you get out there it will come.”

After Cat on a Hot Tin Roofcloses Roe says he will be taking a break after a demanding year of demanding lead roles. But it will be a holiday this time. For Roe, the show will go on.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roofopens at the Gate Theatre on April 5th

Roe's big roles

PETRUCHIO in Rough Magic's The Taming of the Shrew

It was Roe himself who suggested The Taming of the Shrewto director Lynne Parker. "I thought: what if we were to play it against type? So instead of casting matinee idols you would have two people that no one else in the world would want." Anyone who saw it will have an image of Roe in y-fronts indelibly imprinted on their mind.

FRANK HARDY in Gate Theatre’s Faith Healer

Frank Hardy was a challenge Roe says, not just because he was following in the footsteps of Donal McCann (“you hope people won’t compare you, that they appreciate you are bringing something new.”) But also because “with Frank you are connecting directly with the audience – you’re alone on stage with no-one to fall back upon.”

MICHAEL in Gate Theatre’s God of Carnage

Roe calls his role in Yasmina Reza's controversial comedy God of Carnage"one of the most enjoyable roles I have ever played. I get a new kind of nerves, this giddiness, before I go on. There is a real energising power when there are so many laughs."

THE IRISHMAN in The Abbey Theatre’s The Gigli Concert

" The Gigli Concertis brilliant, but it is a tough play – to act in and for the audience. I remember being in Australia and you'd hear the audience at the end. 'Well done mate, you got through it.'"