The role of Bridgie Cleary, a dressmaker burned alive by her husband on suspicion of being a witch, tempted Catherine Walker back to the Irish stage, writes Anna Carey
The best place for a nap, according to actor Catherine Walker, is a theatre dressing room. "I always sleep best in a dressing room," she says. "You can relax, because you know someone is going to wake you up on time and then you're already at work." And Walker certainly needs all the rest she can get at the moment. She's playing the gruelling title role in Tom McIntyre's extraordinary new play What Happened Bridgie Cleary, directed by film maker Alan Gilsenan, and she admits it's exhausting. The play is based on the true story of Bridgie Cleary, a lively young dressmaker who was burned to death by her husband in a small Tipperary town in 1895. Egged on by friends and neighbours, Michael Cleary killed his wife, who was suffering from tuberculosis, because he believed she had been replaced by a changeling.
"I fell in love with Bridgie," says Walker. "Because she was a real person, I spent a lot of time absorbing her life and her spirit." The play shows Bridgie in a purgatory-like afterlife, meeting her husband and her former lover, who must both try to come to terms with their roles in her tragic end. Bridgie is the role of a lifetime, and it brought Walker back to the Dublin stage for the first time in nearly a decade. "As soon as I read the script, I thought, well, if I don't come back for this, I'll never come back," she says. "The first time I read it, I knew it was my part. I knew I understood it."
Walker grew up in the Dublin suburb of Coolock and went to school in Clontarf. She wanted to act from an early age. "My mum was always interested in theatre so we all went to speech and drama lessons," she says. "I used to do a lot of poetry reading - my mum still has the first prize I ever won, in 1979. I was four, and I recited a poem called My Little Dog."
She started doing acting courses in the Gaiety School of Acting while still at school, and began a full-time course there when she had completed the Leaving Cert. "There's nothing like drama school," she says. "You never have all that time again - you can concentrate on one piece of script for weeks." She particularly liked the Gaiety's liberal approach to teaching. "I see graduates coming out of some UK schools and they're like clones," she says. "They look the same, they talk the same, they approach their roles in the same way. But the Gaiety never tried to mould us."
Soon after finishing her theatrical education, Walker got her first professional starring role, playing Cordelia in a Second Age production of King Lear. Some film work followed before she was asked by Ben Barnes to star in his London production of John B. Keane's Sive. "I was dying to get over to London," she says. "It was a chance to travel - it wasn't that I thought theatre was better there, but I'd been working professionally from the age of 21, and in the theatre you can't take time off to travel because it's very much out of sight, out of mind. And I never had the chance to go abroad when I was in the Gaiety because drama school is so full-on." And so she went to England, first to London and then to Brighton, where she now lives with her husband.
Walker's talent and devotion to her craft paid off quite quickly. Soon after the end of Sive's run in London's Tricycle Theatre, she got a job with the Royal Shakespeare Company, playing Vera in Brian Friel's adaptation of A Month in the Country. The production was a huge success, and Walker ended up staying with the RSC for two and a half years. During this time, she managed to escape being pigeonholed by her native accent. "I went in Irish, and a year and a half later I was playing Shakespearean characters," she says. "It's strange, if you're an Irish actor in London you can play American but you'll very rarely play English. The RSC broke that for me."
Walker is obviously a hard worker, but she loves the acting life. "The real work is when you're out of work," she says. "I mean, I'd pay to do my job. You go in to work and you spend the day laughing and playing let's pretend. The real job is when you're looking for work, going around London for auditions."
What Happened Bridgie Cleary will keep her occupied for some time to come, but Walker admits she's dreading the moment when she has to say goodbye to a character she has come to love. "She was strong, she was ahead of her time, she was creative, she was mysterious," says Walker. "That's why they burned her. They tried to control her spirit. It took a long time before I could read the accounts of her actual death, and when I did, I felt as if I were grieving for her."
But she feels that somehow, Bridgie would approve of the play. "I feel her around," she says. "I know that sounds mad, but I do think she's aware of the play. She's a bit of a guardian angel." u