He packed in teaching for acting, making ends meet by working as a bouncer. Now, as he prepares for the West End, Don Wycherley has become an acting heavyweight - even if he may always be best known as a goofy priest, he tells Belinda McKeon.
His dishevelled charm made Don Wycherley a popular man among the residents of the house where I spent my college years. For a while it was a toss-up between the unlikely hero of Bachelors Walk and the Gabriel Byrne of the Bracken reruns. So a few things give me pause when I meet him in the lobby of the Abbey Theatre. He looks as if he has been up since Friday. And it's Monday. He is also carting around two enormous battered plastic bags, from which a collection of garments is busily spilling. Then there's his mullet. But it is when the actor greets me that I'm truly startled. For he doesn't so much say hello as croak it. Has Don Wycherley lost the Voice?
You'll know the Voice if you followed Wycherley's adventures as the hapless Raymond, loser in love and the only young Dubliner this side of the Emergency to own a house in the centre of the city (and with a parking spot outside his door!); if you saw him roar his way across the stage as the violent London-Irishman Harry Carney in the Abbey's 2001 revival of Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark; or if you heard his soporific ramblings as Billy, the frustrated midlands husband, in Eden, Eugene O'Brien's explosive first play. It's a voice so distinctive that it practically gets a dressingroom to itself, to match the name it has made for itself in the lucrative business of radio voice-overs. Glutted with syrup and coarsened with gravel, it lulls and soothes even as it chafes and drags, plumbing effortlessly the depths of the messed-up characters that have become his strength - and handy, too, for grabbing the attention of jaded radio audiences.
So where is it? Why this inoffensive rasp where it used to be? Blame for the lot - the tattered voice box, the tattered appearance and, come to think of it, the unhappy typecasting to which a dog called Tatters now seems doomed - rests firmly at the door of Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, which has just concluded its long, long Dublin run, at the Abbey, and is set to move to the West End of London in May.
Still hoarse after a party that John McColgan, The Shaughraun's director, hosted two nights ago after the sold-out show's final performance, laden down with the contents of the dressingroom he has occupied, by and large, since early last summer, and mullet-haired in keeping with the demands of the 19th-century characters he played in the show, Wycherley is anticipating his first evening off in months. Excepting Sundays, he has been swinging and leaping and plamásing his way around the painted peaks and valleys of an ostentatiously elaborate set since November, when he took over the role of Conn the Shaughraun from Adrian Dunbar, who had played the amiable rogue in the hit summer run that ensured the show a winter revival.
Given that Wycherley played a leading role - Kinchela, moustached landlord of dark intentions - in that first run also, and that between them the summer and winter runs notched up 158 performances, it's unsurprising that he looks and sounds somewhat the worse for wear as he steps back into the present. The Shaughraun has been demanding, he admits, in a different sense to the sort of plays with which he made his name as a stage actor - and it hasn't simply been down to the perils of having a terrier, the aforementioned Tatters, for a sidekick.
"It was all out there," he laughs. "There was no hiding. Something like Eden, on a small stage, I can take it down to this level and talk intimately and people will listen. I'm well used to shouting on stage; it's just that over a period of three months with that, and the running and the jumping, the swinging, things can go wrong. I've landed on the cliff badly. I've caught the axe. I've sprained my knee. I've sprained my ankle. Your voice goes. It's a different kind of danger."
Danger, indeed. This brings us nicely to the delicate question of quite another kind of danger: the impact on the career of an actor renowned for his interpretations of complex and powerful characters of becoming indelibly linked with a show that, while massively successful, is hardly an example of fine theatre.
I'm sorry, I tell Wycherley, but it's time to do my sniffy critic's act: though there was some mercy in the humour of his performance, I cringed my way through The Shaughraun, and I wasn't the only one. Yes, there's a time and a place for hearty Oirish dance routines, for husky girleens in busty gowns, for cardboard heroes and villains and for naughty innuendo. Yes, there are performers who fit perfectly such roles, but . . . Yet as The Shaughraun heads for London it will be crowded with actors who come if not from the front line of Irish theatre, then at least from within touching distance of it, with Wycherley the heavyweight among them. Does he worry that some actors and directors may perceive him as having caved to a sell-out even vaster than that of The Shaughraun at the box office?
Wycherley considers this for a minute, then, as he attempts to answer, embarks on a series of sighs and splutters so colourful they could have a voice-over career of their own. He's not angry. Rather, he seems befuddled, and as with all the questions put to him, he's meeting this one as honestly and as openly as he can. "I don't think so," he says finally. "I hear what you're saying. But . . ." He sighs again, then repeats what I have just said, as if weighing it up . "I mean, damage your career?" Another sigh. "I don't think so. Honestly. Actors, first of all, know it's work," he says, more stridently now, "and at the end of a day if you take on a job you do it, you do it well. The show's a success. It is employing 30 actors-stroke-dancers-stroke-musicians, and most people, you know, you might be cynical, but then you're asked to come along and play a part, and you go."
He laughs. "It's the first time I've actually thought about it. Never work again." And then he launches into an imaginary dialogue between these imagined future critics. "Him," he mimics. "Do you remember him in The Shaughraun?" "Did he not play Harry Carney [ in A Whistle in the Dark], no?" asks another. "Ah no," says the first, "The Shaughraun, that's all we can remember, that's all he ever played." He laughs, shrugs the vision off.
Though modest, he knows the worth of his versatility as a performer. He played a young priest for two years on Ballykissangel, gave that role a memorably comic twist as Dougal's arch-rival in Father Ted, appeared in films such as The General and Veronica Guerin and has done stage work ranging from The Comedy of Errors to Translations. In the week we meet he is preparing to do a radio play for RTÉ as well as getting ready for rehearsals for his next stage role, in the Gate's forthcoming production of Billy Roche's Poor Beast in the Rain. And although he insists it was the script of The Shaughraun and the challenge of drawing the laughs out of the two characters he played that drew him in, he knows, too, that an actor has to create his own salary. He couldn't, he says, keep his family of three children - sons Jack and Evan, aged 10 and two, and daughter Kate, aged eight - and pay the mortgage, even if he were on the top wage for Abbey actors all year round.
But hard work is something he is used to. When he met his wife, Deirdre Mulvanny, he was working as a bouncer in a Leeson Street nightclub in the small hours while rehearsing plays by day and doing walk-on parts at the Abbey and Peacock in the evenings. Having trained as a primary-school teacher, he taught for a while in Finglas before the desire to do something else drove him towards acting and a course at the Gaiety school.
Needing to keep four jobs at once was the first lesson he learned when he graduated from the Gaiety School of Acting, in 1992, and although a one-year Abbey contract given to him by Garry Hynes, who was then its artistic director, brought some security, it was followed by a worryingly fallow period. It was then he got smart about making a living from his craft and decided to diversify. The voice-over work remains the family's bread and butter, he says - Deirdre now works at home - though, ironically, less of it has come his way since Bachelors Walk made his voice too recognisable. He believes all young actors should be taught to market themselves this way.
That said, he can't stand hearing himself. "I hate the sound of my own voice, the voice that I'm speaking to you in now," he says. I don't quite believe him. "My God," he responds. "I hate it. Oh, I hate it. And I am so done now." By "done" he means impersonated: there seems to be a micro-industry in copying him. Different mimics have different specialisations. "Eugene O'Brien, he does me when I'm drunk, which is terrible - and not very often - and Rory Keenan [ Captain Molineux in The Shaughraun] does me doing Billy from Eden. Risteárd Cooper does me doing voice-overs, and I'm going" - he covers his face - "leave me alone!" He makes a sound that is part laugh, part groan. "I don't know. I suppose you just accept it. What does Eamon Dunphy do but laugh? It's just one of those voices." He thinks for a moment, then snaps out of it. "Listen," he says frankly. "I need my voice box. It gets me work, so I'm not going slagging it off."
That his voice opens doors is certainly true. In the mid-1990s, auditioning for a part in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, he realised he stood no chance of getting a part, so he dropped into conversation with Jordan the fact that he hails from the same neck of the woods as Collins - and landed the job as voice coach to Liam Neeson.
That neck of the woods, of course, is west Cork. Wycherley was born on a small farm a mile outside Skibbereen. He returns as often as he can to see Marie, his mother, who raised him and his two brothers after his father, Florence, a farmer, auctioneer and, at one time, independent TD fighting for farmers' interests, died of a heart attack when Don was not yet two years old. "It was just an amazing thing," he remembers. He means amazing in the original sense of the word, as in bewildering, confounding.
"She had a three-month-old baby, me - a year and a half - and a three-year-old. And, suddenly, gone. She made the conscious decision to go back to work. She had been working as a nurse. I think, in many respects, if I'm honest, Mam probably had postnatal depression, probably suffered, probably went through a lot of that. I don't think there was anything at the time." She just kept going? "Yeah." He pauses.
His mother came to see The Shaughraun and adored it, and this meant a lot to him. "The stuff that you hated she just loved," he says, not pointedly, but I feel chastened anyway. He's talking very intensely as he recalls those years.
When he was 11 his mother suffered the further blow of seeing one of her five stepchildren - the children of Florence's first marriage, by then all adults - die by electrocution while working in his milking parlour. John, who was 33, had been a father and brother rolled into one for the young Don. Wycherley speaks of the pure happiness he felt around him, of the phone call telling of his death and of being unable to understand. But Marie Wycherley understood. She had to. "I sometimes wish she had a better life."
The last sentence comes with such force that for a moment I see a different person, glimpse the source of that searing intensity with which he can imbue his darkest characters, his outsiders, his failures, his bitter, burdened men. Gas as Conn the Shaughraun might have been, it's on the energy of these troubled men that he seems to thrive onstage. "Just two people talking in a small room and no moving sets." No razzmatazz is to him the best sort of drama, he says. A Whistle in the Dark remains a favourite play, and Biff in Death of a Salesman is the part he would love to play, having finally given up on ever getting the part of Synge's Playboy.
There is nothing he loves more, he says, than getting to the heart of a part. "There are some times when you are that character, and you come off stage and you think that was the quintessential him, that was it. And there's an energy. You do tap into whatever violent streak is in you, because sometimes you are absolutely on an emotional turn out there, which you have to keep on a wrap.
"Like, if it's going full tilt and you've got an actor who's giving it back to you and you're looking in each other's eyes and it's working and . . ." He pauses, and when he speaks again the hoarse edge has all but faded from his voice. "There is no greater feeling. It is almost real."
Poor Beast in the Rain, by Billy Roche, opens at the Gate, Dublin, on April 12th, with previews from April 7th. The Shaughraun opens at the Albery Theatre, London, on May 23rd
DID WE WIN, DICK? WHY SOME SCENES STICK IN THE MIND
'The role Wycherley says he will be remembered for, long after all the others have been forgotten, is that of Fr Cyril MacDuff, the goofy trainee priest who was arch-rival to Ardal O'Hanlon's Fr Dougal McGuire in several episodes of Father Ted (right).
"Did we win, Dick?", the question Fr Cyril asks his colleague Fr Dick Byrne after they've been defeated in the Song for Europe contest by Ted and Dougal's My Lovely Horse, is still hollered at Wycherley in the street.
Somehow he has managed to keep his children from seeing their dad in a red satin frock, as a Three Degrees singer, in the episode in which Cyril and Dick got into the spirit of a priestly Stars in their Eyes talent contest. "I usually get to the remote in time," he laughs.
Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Wycherley's time as Fr Cyril was that it was followed by two years as the saintliest priest on television, the young curate Fr Aidan in Ballykissangel (left). "I thought they were taking the mick," he says. "I remember keeping the Fr Cyril thing pretty quiet during the audition."
It wasn't his worst audition, though; that came when he tried for Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York and found himself being escorted from the building after getting on the wrong side of a casting director. And no, he didn't get the part.