Bryan Murray is still getting over the spectacular collapse of the theme park he was sure would entrance Irish children. Not that it has influenced the choice of play for his first appearance on a Dublin stage for almost 20 years, he tells Belinda McKeon
Bryan Murray is not buying my theory. There is no similarity, he insists, between the situation in which he recently found himself, as actor turned director of the spectacularly unsuccessful theme park Poga's Wonderland, and the situation facing the central character in Edward Albee's 2002 play, The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? His decision to take on the role of Martin, Murray says, had everything to do with the quality of Albee's writing, and with the power of the play, and nothing to do with the sound of bells of familiarity ringing in his ear.
It's cruel, then, to draw the parallels, but it's irresistible. Both men are handsome and charismatic, and those traits serve them both well in their careers: Martin as an architect, Murray as an actor known best, despite starting in theatre, for his television roles as the mischievous Flurry Knox in The Irish RM, as the brutal husband Trevor Jordache in Brookside and, most recently, as the corrupt taoiseach in Proof. Both men have toppled from a position of wealth and professional success to one of catastrophe, and have found their prospects in tatters.
And admittedly, given that there is a world of difference between Martin's relationship to Sylvia the goat and Murray's to Poga, the friendly dragon he created for his Co Kildare venture, this may be straining the comparison, but boy have they suffered for their dodgy dalliances with the animal kingdom.
"Martin," says Murray, in a tone that suggests I couldn't be further off the mark, and that he'd like to have this part of the conversation over with as quickly as possible, "is a man who's the perfect man in the perfect relationship. He comes from a place of almost perfection, almost a complete pinnacle of success. And it's important that Albee creates this perfect relationship, so that, in typical Greek-tragedy form, a single act of Martin's can destroy the whole edifice of perfection around him. It is the fall from grace for a man at the top of his profession."
I'm still getting the familiarity bells. But Murray, it genuinely seems, is not. And if so, there's a deep irony in the fact that he should find himself drawn, apparently unconsciously, towards this character over all the others, as he attempts to re-establish himself as the serious actor he was before he allowed Poga to come and stamp his dirty green paws all over his reputation. Because it's clear that, with The Goat, he's hoping to close that embarrassing chapter of his life and open another, happier one.
Murray is tense at first, wanting to talk only about the play. He seems to be dreading a barrage of questions about the theme park. About the €1.4 million debt with which it left him and his fellow directors, about the many creditors, the involvement in the affair of two other companies of which he happened to be a director. About the planning, and the marketing, and whether the Poga idea was just too contrived and too commercially minded - not to mention overpriced - ever really to appeal to Ireland's children.
Murray is open, to a certain extent, to discussing the affair, although his face remains drawn and guarded until we have left it well behind. The year has been "extremely difficult, very very tough", he says. "It was something, actually, that I believed with every fibre of my bones would work. And that three years that I put everything on hold and went for it was out of excitement and commitment, and unfortunately it didn't work." When did he realise that Poga's Wonderland was going to be a failure? "Not until very, very late," he says. "We were expecting it to work."
They were hoping, in fact, for 1,500 visitors a day, but over the two months that the park survived the figure was closer to 300 a day. Despite being so badly burned, Murray still believes the idea could work in Ireland, given different circumstances - there are a lot of families, he says, and a dearth of family entertainment - but he's not going to be the one to take it up again. And he doesn't want to talk about it any more. "I've said everything about it that I possibly can say. I've thought about it in my bed at night. It's been a very painful year, and something that I'm sorry about, and you just take your pieces and put them back together and carry on. And working on a play like this . . .'
And he's off. Talking about the only thing he really wants to talk about. Talking about how impressive and profound a play this is - and indeed it is, coming from the man who is, in the wake of Arthur Miller's death, arguably the most important living US playwright. It is audacious and original, a tightly written, bravely drawn exploration of deceit and betrayal, of tolerance and subversion and, most of all, of love and its boundaries. Murray cannot speak enough about how much satisfaction he is deriving from the process of rehearsing it with the director Michael Caven and with his fellow actors, including Susan FitzGerald, who will play Martin's wife, Stevie. There's nothing, he says, like the depth and buzz of the rehearsal period. And this, he says once again, is a truly great play. "You're lucky if you get a play this good to work on a few times in your life."
But still, it is just part of Murray's life at the moment, a life that includes, too, his home in London, which he shares with his wife of 17 years, Juliet Ramsay, and their four young children: Henry, Florence, Eva and Gracie, the youngest just five years old. Then there is Laura, his 22-year-old daughter from his first marriage, to Angela Harding, the woman who played his wife in the 1970s TV dramatisation of Strumpet City. Murray left Harding in 1986, when he met and fell in love with Ramsay during the original run of Blood Brothers at the Olympia. He was in the cast; she was stage manager. The Goat will be his first time on an Irish stage since then. Although his life remains in London, it's not difficult to sense his hope that this role may mark, for him, a more permanent return - a more permanent experience of getting lucky.
After all, it was as an actor that Murray began, joining the Abbey company at the age of 19, remaining there for seven years before going on to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. Television work, however, made his name. The current Sunday reruns of The Irish RM on RTÉ are probably winning a new set of fans for fresh-faced Flurry, while playing the wife-beating Jordache in Brookside brought the peak of his fame, even requiring Murray to have a police escort for a time. "Mersey TV [which made the soap opera for Channel 4] got a phone call from someone who said that they knew where I was staying, knew who I was, and that I had thrown a lady who had been in treatment for having been abused back into her experience again, through her watching me. And this person was out to get me."
Although crazed couch potatoes might have been keen to get their hands on him, Irish theatre directors seemed less interested - strangely, for an actor of his calibre who had started out from their patch and illustrated a wide playing range. He is too careful to complain about this, but he makes clear that he's "always up for a good offer". Would he consider coming back to Ireland to rebuild his theatre career here? "I'd never say never," he says. "You can't help but have roots down when you've got young children going to school. But the trouble of being an Irish person in England - and if I was English in Ireland, it'd be the same - is that you don't really have a home ground. You know, you don't have a White Hart Lane or a place like that." Not that coming home would solve this. Having lived in England for so long, Murray feels a permanent sense of being an outsider. "I was born in Dublin and all that, but it isn't really my home ground either any more. You find yourself being a displaced person, really. But actors are displaced by nature."
Murray's links to Dublin are strong: his parents, who gave him a "great childhood" in Islandbridge, though now elderly, still live in the city, and his daughter Laura is a student at Trinity. She has displayed no real interest in becoming an actor. Unusually, Murray admits to hoping that at least one of his children will. "It's in the blood," he laughs. "It's the family business."
Of his five children, Laura has been the only one to grow up in Ireland, although she is close to the others. It still strikes him as "interesting" to find himself raising four little Londoners. "I think we all need to have a sense of comfort and familiarity about certain things," he says. "And if you're bringing up children - and I'm a working-class boy from Dublin bringing up London middle-class children - you've got to make the jump. They don't, that's who they are. I'm the one who has to remember that it's a different time and that the same sensibilities don't apply. It's just something that you notice. I'm bringing up children who come from a different world and expect a different culture. But they all embrace Ireland. When Ireland are playing rugby against England in London, they'll cheer for Ireland."
Life as a family man is good, he says. He shares music with his son - "a great lead guitarist, thank God". At the moment they're both into Snow Patrol and Fountains of Wayne. He also discusses Jamie's Dinners with his daughters. "They say to me: 'Look, Dad, they're the turkey twizzlers we get.' I think Jamie [Oliver] should get a medal for what he's done. It's wondrous."
Certainly, there have been periods when he has had a little too much time on his hands for pleasures like this, as bouts of unemployment are the lot of the actor. Murray has been relatively fortunate, however. Although he shunned acting while he developed Poga's Wonderland, Murray has never gone for very long without acting work against his will; he remembers a nine-month quiet period with a shudder, but it doesn't seem so bad compared with what some actors endure.
"You don't ever get used to those periods of unemployment," he says, "but you learn to incorporate them into your life as part of the thing you've got to confront. You have to get a degree of 'get over it' about your life. And you get that, and you lose it, and you get it, and you lose it.' For now, at least, it seems Murray has it.
The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? opens at Project, Dublin, on Monday