When Sarah Brennan appears this week with her father Stephen in 'The Life of Galileo', she will represent the third generation of Brennans to walk the boards. Peter Crawley digs up the family tree of the theatrical dynasty.
Stephen Brennan is complaining again. It is shortly after a demanding day of rehearsals for Rough Magic Theatre Company's latest production, Bertolt Brecht's The Life of Galileo, and Brennan, one of the most recognised stage actors of his generation, is letting off steam. "As a young actor I found it a bloody nuisance," he says, so personable and engaging that it can be difficult to know if he is genuinely annoyed. The "bloody nuisance" in question, of course, is this difficult business of being a Brennan - of belonging to a family synonymous with an art form.
"And nobody did me any favours, I can tell you," he continues, now steamrolling along. "I started in the chorus and I stayed there for many years before I started playing lead parts. And, my god, I think coming through the ranks is a good thing for people. Unfortunately, a lot of people coming out of schools and universities think they should start at the top and work their way down." Beside him, his 26-year-old daughter, Sarah Brennan, rolls her eyes to the heavens. Performing alongside her father's Galileo, in the role of the scientist's daughter, she may identify with this predicament. Or maybe she has just heard it all before.
At first, they are reluctant to entertain questions about how they balance their personal and professional relationship. Yes, they are father and daughter. Yes, they are now playing a father and daughter. But the stage relationship is so removed from their own that it never becomes an issue. When, early in the play, Virginia asks Galileo if she can peer through his telescope, Galileo is not so much discouraging as deliberately cruel: "Why?" he responds. "It is not a toy." This is a world away from their own shared experience, where, as a girl, Sarah once borrowed her father's tights.
Whether they like it or not, however, there comes a line in the play (translated by Howard Brenton) which may generate a peculiar frisson.While Galileo's revolutionary discoveries affront the authority of the Church - shattering philosophical systems and threatening social orders with his insistence that the earth orbits the sun - the Vatican's Inquistor discovers that Virginia knows nothing about physics. "No one eats fish in a fisherman's house, eh?" he smirks.
Au contraire. For the Brennans, acting is the family business and it provides a pretty consistent diet. "I'm sure people have this wonderful fantasy of us all sitting around being fruity, talking about theatre and Uncle Vanya," mocks Stephen. "It's not like that. We're very ordinary, grounded people." They speak like people who may not want to take their work home with them, but who are accustomed to people inevitably seeing home in their work.
This was almost unavoidable with The Drunkard, a melodrama produced by Stephen's sister, Jane Brennan's company, B*Spoke, and adapted by her partner, the playwright Tom Murphy. It featured both Sarah and Stephen in its cast, but less conspicuous were the echoes of Stephen's father, Denis Brennan, who had played the same role years before.
"As a kid I'd seen a lot of photographs of shows he'd been in," says Brennan. "But I never really saw my father on the stage. Seeing pictures of this melodrama, it looked like really good fun. It was very different, I'm sure, from the show that my father would have done. But those photographs informed the way I played it."
Brennan, who has spoken before about the difficulty of his father's alcoholism, may have used the production to re-establish his kinship. "It was funny," he says, "because I ended up wearing, literally, my father's shoes - this pair of shoes he used to have, I ended up wearing in the show. It was a nice feeling of tradition and continuity that I felt when I was doing that, just like there is when I work with Sarah; the fact that something is being passed on."
Working together in what Stephen readily admits is an unforgiving business - "There will always be a group of people who want to act in any one generation," he says, "and most of them won't be able to act and a few of them will," - one wonders if it brings them closer? "Yeah, I suppose it does, doesn't it?" Stephen asks. "Yeah," says Sarah without hesitation and with little conviction. "Certainly if you want to know me, come on tour with me," laughs Stephen and grabs her by the shoulder.
Sarah laughs and grimaces, issuing a sing-song "Oh yeah," in the tone of one who might have been happier in ignorance. She recalls, in particular, a frenetic visit to a nightclub in Galway during the tour of The Drunkard, when her father rushed up to her and asked, "Is my hair dripping down my face?" "I had my hair dyed black for the show," Stephen cuts in, stroking his short silver beard, "and I suddenly had a vision of Dirk Bogarde in Death in Venice - black rivulets dribbling down his forehead."
Though Denis Brennan and Stephen's mother Daphne Carroll were both established stage actors, Stephen originally tried a career in advertising before finding haven in the chorus line. When work couldn't be found, he staged his own shows in the Project theatre. Sarah has also gone down this route and founded her own independent theatre company, X-Bel-Air, which she co-directs with her friend and colleague Roisin McBrinn.
Sarah is typical of a new generation of actors, where professional training is gradually becoming the entry-level requirement for beginning a career. She trained first with Ann Kavanagh's Young People's Theatre, before graduating with a degree in Drama and Theatre Studies from Trinity College's Samuel Beckett School of Drama. (When I ask Stephen whether he had ever considered professional training, he reacts as though I have just accused him of international arms dealing.)
Developing an interest in magic realism, and particularly in the plays of American playwright José Rivera in college, Sarah brought to her course a uniquely practical understanding of the theatre. While grasping the place of semiotics and existentialism in the plays of Beckett, for instance, she could also relate a frequent family gripe at the playwright: "Damn Beckett. He had no respect for his actors." While her father was stooped over, horizontally, in the role of Lucky in Waiting For Godot, and her grandmother Daphne recalled hours confined to a dustbin when playing Nell in Endgame, Sarah approached the theatre as a first hand, lived-in experience. The stage was a place where you had to get your hands dirty.
The family keeps career guidance to a minimum, however. "I would have to stand away from Sarah a lot of the time," says Stephen. "I would give input if required or if I thought it was necessary - in a gentle way. But, in acting, everybody has their own way." Sarah does recall discreet taps on the shoulder during The Drunkard, though. The "slightly guiding" whispers of approval or constructive criticism. There is, after all, a name to protect.
"Sometimes I get exasperated when I hear him giving out about things," says Sarah when her father is safely out of earshot. "I would love to be in his position. You don't even have to audition. People come to you. That's what I aspire to."
Unable ever to emerge fully from her father's shadow, Georgina Bloomberg, daughter of New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, once said, succinctly: "Sometimes having the last name Bloomberg sucks." With the reputations of Stephen, and his sisters Barbara and Jane, not to mention Sarah's mother, the Fair City regular Martina Stanley, to contend with, is there ever a downside to being a Brennan?
"There is, actually," Sarah concedes softly. "I do feel that people have a lot of preconceptions about you, in a variety of ways. Sometimes, when I go for a job, I think it might be easier if I had a bit more anonymity."
There are, ofcourse, also attendant comforts. "It's great having a family that is in the business, and who are so supportive, from my granny right down. I know a lot of actors whose parents don't understand, they have no conception of what they're doing. It must be very lonely for them, I feel."
It seems the theatre can forge direct (if unusual) bonds between a father and daughter, and both recall with a mixture of pride and squeamishness Stephen's time in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. For a science experiment that required nylons, the young Sarah went home one day looking for tights. "Borrow your father's," she was told. "She's also one of the only daughters who can say she's borrowed her father's false eyelashes," admits Stephen. He rubs his beard. She tightens her lips. Their eyes meet, exactly the same colour brown, and convey a tradition of mutual support and self-sufficiency, one that is passed on from shoe-to-shoe, and from eyelash-to-eyelash.
THE FAMILY BUSINESS
Think family business and you immediately encounter a sphere of hereditary succession that may seem more dependant on circumstance than capability. Acting, however, is rather different; the talent for performance is not easily drawn from a gene pool. For every Cusack there must inevitably be a Baldwin. All of which makes the Brennan family tree, with its deep-set roots, twisting branches and whorled leaves, quite handsomely peculiar, delivering either a plumb line through the most fervent artistic endeavours of this country, or, at the very least, Irish theatre's answer to the Kevin Bacon game.
Denis Brennan's career on the stage hit its peak during the 1950s and early 1960s, performing opposite Micheál Mac Líammóir in The Informer at the Olympia, or as the villainous Phelim McGinty in The Drunkard. He starred in Maura Laverty's Tolka Row, which eventually became RTÉ's first television soap opera and featured the then 18-year-old Jim Bartley, now a Fair City regular, and ex-husband to Denis's daughter Barbara Brennan).
Denis died, at the age of 55, from liver cancer. He and his wife, Daphne Carroll, a former Abbey actress, had five children: Stephen, Barbara, Jane, Cathryn and Paul. Carroll performed against her son Stephen in the Abbey's premiere of Hugh Leonard's A Life in 1979, and has been directed by Paul in The Glass Menagerie for The Gate. Last year she received a Lifetime Membership Award from Irish Equity for "dedicated service and lifetime contribution" to the profession.
Barbara Brennan, who is currently appearing in a West End run of By the Bog of Cats, has performed in Pygmalion and Jane Eyre (both with brother Stephen) and A Christmas Carol (with Stephen, and her daughter, Eva Bartley) all at The Gate. Her Hedda Gabler at the same theatre in 1984 is still vividly remembered.
Jane Brennan, who carried Tom Kilroy's ground-breaking play The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde for The Abbey in 1997, has originated roles in Conversations on a Homecoming and The Wake, both written by her partner, Tom Murphy. In 2001 she performed under his direction in Bailegangaire during the Abbey's Tom Murphy Festival. Founding B*spoke theatre company with Alison McKenna in 2001, she has since produced three shows, employing several other Brennans, and performed most recently in David Mamet's Boston Marriage.
Cathryn Brennan has been a stage and television actor and now works with the RTÉ 'Rep' as a radio actor and producer.
Forfeiting curtain calls for directing (although he has performed in several plays, including two Tom Murphy premières) Paul Brennan has directed three Bernard Farrell premieres, and founded Poc productions in 2001 to produce works in Irish and English. More than once he has directed his sister-in-law, the actress Martina Stanley, who is now separated from Stephen Brennan.
Stanley, a long serving cast member with RTÉ's Fair City, has four children with Stephen. The eldest, Sarah Brennan - interviewed on these pages, is a graduate of the Samuel Beckett School of Drama in Trinity College and is co-founder/director of X-Bel-Air Theatre Company. Kate, we are told, is fast succumbing to acting ("We're too liberal," frowns her father) while has been drawn more to art. Perhaps the most professionally-admired family member, Johnny Brennan, recently returned from shooting his second film in South Africa. "He has the right idea: stick to that end of the business," approves Stephen. Johnny is 12.
Rough Magic's production of The Life of Galileo runs at Project, Temple Bar, Dublin, from February 17th to March 5th. Booking: 01-8819613/4, www.project.ie