There is something about the Irish character that seems to breed actors in great quantities. Maybe it's the national gregariousness, the joy in language or just the native propensity for showing off. Whatever the reason there's never been a time, thank goodness, when a fresh wave of talent hasn't been breaking on the theatre doors in defiance of the rocks of constant unemployment, inadequate pay and rotten working conditions that await these hopefuls. Some of them sink without trace, some struggle on to make a living of one kind or another, and just a very few rise above the difficulties to become among the leaders of their profession and to set a standard for everyone who comes after.
Donal McCann was such a one, the pre-eminent figure of his generation, revered by his contemporaries as much as by younger theatre people. In this he stood in a line of great Irish actors that stretches back some 300 years. His progenitors, as leaders of the profession in the 20th century, include such towering figures of the early Abbey as Barry Fitzgerald, Sarah Allgood, and F.J. McCormick, while in our own time there have been Micheal MacLiammoir,
Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack, to name but some. The sad thing about them is that, for the most part, as Keats wrote in his epitaph, their names are "writ in water". Pre-eminently, they were stage actors and their great performances ended when the curtain came down.
The cinema and television offer us some glimpses of them, but there are no Irish Oliviers to thrill us for all time with leading roles in great films. The international cinema, which so frequently prefers to cast a third-rate English or American performer to a first rate native one, even when the subject is Irish, ensures that all too often our greatest actors have been reduced to supporting parts. McCann played in several movies, but in the main they were low budget art pictures with a limited audience. He never got the chance to strut his stuff in a major Hollywood film and achieve the kind of international fame (not that it would have meant much to him) which his massive talent deserved.
Once or twice one gets some inkling of it; in his beautiful restrained playing as Gabriel Conroy in John Huston's magical film of Joyce's The Dead, in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's December Bride and in Bob Quinn's The Bishop's Story, but though there were other good performances, they were in a minor key, and future generations will know him largely by repute only. It was really only when he went to London and New York, playing in Sebastian Barry's marvellous stage play, The Steward of Christendom that the world woke up to his greatness. Together with his powerful monologues as Frank Hardy in Brian Friel's Faith Healer, it is generally regarded as his greatest role. Sadly, it was also to be his last one.
In the end, it was the theatre that really counted for him. He had all the attributes for it: a face that was good looking yet strong, with those big haunted eyes, a voice that was rich, yet with a strange melancholic break that made it instantly recognisable, even if you heard it on radio, and unique timing that allowed him to say his lines - even very well-known lines - in a way that managed to be his own, yet never to lose their force or meaning. He had also, of course, that indefinable thing called star quality. When he was on stage your eye kept going back to him, even when he was silent, though he never used it to up-stage his fellow performers. The show was always more important to him than his own role in it. There always seemed to be something going on beneath the surface, intriguing stuff that hinted at tragedy even in his comic roles.
Truth to tell, he was in many ways a tortured soul. He had a deeply depressive side to him which, mixed with alcohol, could turn him from a kindly and witty companion into something of a monster, rude and abusive. He fought a long and bitter battle with his alcoholism and, in the general sorrow that surrounds his too early death, it is a joy to know that he conquered it in the end. There was a time when one wondered if he was ever going to be able to work again, he had behaved badly so often, made so many enemies and got such a reputation for unreliability, the antithesis of his sober self.
But he picked himself up off the floor when Joe Dowling cast him as Captain Boyle in the celebrated Gate Theatre production of O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, in which he gave a wonderful tragi-comic pas de deux with John Kavanagh as Joxer. There was a stormy rehearsal period with a minder appointed to keep him out of the pubs but, even so, he was so difficult that halfway through, Dowling and the Gate's director, Michael Colgan, were on the brink of firing him. He was saved, according to Dowling, by Kavanagh, who said he would prefer to work with McCann, even as he was, than with any other actor.
The production was acclaimed as perhaps the best ever of the play and went to Broadway for a short run, where it received superlative reviews. The producers wanted it to remain on and spoke of it running for three years, but it wasn't possible to get it off the ground and the chance went begging.
However, it's not true, as theatrical legend has it, that the reason it didn't stay was because McCann was unwilling to stay on the dry any longer than the three-week run. Other members of the cast had commitments and there were also difficulties in getting an extension because of American Equity rules about foreign performers. Indeed Broadway has had to wait to see the play again until Noel Pearson's production of it, directed by Garry Hynes, opens later this year.
Thereafter, McCann had a period in which he would go off drink during the rehearsals and run of whatever play he was in, followed by monumental batters, during which he would vanish for weeks on end. It must have been hellishly difficult to pull himself together again so often, but eventually he realised it was an impossible way to work. He finally weaned himself off drink altogether and was to remain off it for the rest of his life.
The poet Paul Durcan, one of his closest friends, says it meant a great deal to him. "Never a day passed," says Durcan, "when he didn't say: `It's wonderful.' Even when he was very sick in St James's Hospital he said to me: `Isn't it wonderful I'm not drinking. Imagine if I was drinking now', meaning he'd probably be trying to duck out for one in the middle of treatment. It was as if he was seeing the world through washed eyes. It may offend some ears today, but he thanked God for everything. He was quite religious in the old sense, a man of deep faith, as our fathers might say. But his faith had nothing to do with anger, that was reserved for those he saw as Pharisees."
He didn't become a saint, though. Even after he gave up drinking, he could be tetchy and difficult. When he was working on a play everything was subjugated to it. "I'd get phone calls from him at one in the morning giving off about something or someone," recalls Joe Dowling. And if anybody did something he didn't like during a play he'd mutter fiercely at them on stage. He used to terrify the younger players. I think it came out of a mix of personal insecurity and perfectionism."
There's a quotation from Newsweek, much used in the appreciations of him that have appeared this week, which always makes me smile. It remarked that McCann "had an ego about one-twentieth the size of a Hollywood bit player". The truth of the matter was that Donal's ego throughout his career was as thriving and flourishing as that of most actors, a necessary part of survival in a trade that calls on bravery most of us don't possess and where humiliation is always lurking around the next corner. What he never did, though, was trample on others to satisfy that ego and that is why he remained one of the most popular people in the Irish theatre right up to his death.
Tomas MacAnna, former artistic director of the Abbey, knew him from the time when, as a young man he came into the theatre, still located at the old Queen's, playing his first small part in Thomas Muskerry by Padraic Colum and appearing as Seamus Bond in one of the pantomimes in Irish which were mounted at Christmas. MacAnna speaks of his "wonderful personality that filled the stage" and remembers him quietly going over his lines in the pub after rehearsals. "He could be difficult," he agrees, "but all great actors have their difficult side. There's a nervous tension all the time that's hard to cope with. There was an eccentricity there, but the talent was so amazing that you'd put up with anything."
When, in the 1960s, the Abbey moved into the premises which is its present home, he was one of a generation of young actors, directors and designers who, under MacAnna, gave the theatre a whole new impetus after the dreary years of exile in the Queen's. He played the title role in the first stage version of Patrick Kavanagh's Tarry Flynn and a lisping young British officer in Hugh Hunt's production of The Shaughraun, which was to revive the reputation of Boucicault as a playwright, and thereafter he was cast only in leading parts. Paul Durcan remembers how moved Kavanagh was by McCann's depiction of Tarry, who is of course the poet himself.
His end was sad, as all endings are, leaving his friends with the feeling that it was too soon. But he did find a serenity in his last year that was not always present in the rest of his life. Durcan recalls how after "a ferocious operation, when he nearly died" his friend Kate Sweetman took him to her house in Duleek in Co Meath for five months. "It was so moving to seem him making his way back," says Durcan. "His acceptance was amazing. He wanted to know from the doctors exactly where he stood. He would travel up and down to St Luke's for treatment, always in good humour. He always had a great love of words and would do The Irish Times and the Guardian crosswords every day."
He had charm to burn, when he chose to use it, and a quirky, fully functioning sense of humour. Once, when the Gate brought its celebrated Juno to the Jerusalem Festival, the company was accompanied by a journalist whose main interest seemed to be in knocking the production and those involved in it. One morning McCann came down to breakfast with a sore throat, or feigning one. "What happened?" asked the hack, eager as always for bad news. "It's terrible," said McCann. "I went for a ride on a camel and one of its hairs went up my nose and down into my throat. They can't do a thing about it." To the delight of everybody, the tall story appeared verbatim in next day's Irish Press.
He loved horse racing and was forever scanning the papers for potential winners, looking for clues in lines or the titles of plays he had done. It was apt, therefore, that among the gifts which were brought up during his funeral mass was a copy of the Racing Post. He could draw well and used to present fellow members of the cast with little quirky cartoons during the runs of plays. I remember spotting him once, when the Cavaliers, the Irish theatre cricket team, got to the final of a competition, sitting alone out on the boundary at College Park. He had come to support the team. I went over to talk to him. "Not bad for a bunch of mere actors" he said in the sardonic way he had. (His comments, I suspect, would have been less than flattering about some of the more over-the-top tributes which have been paid to him in the past week.)
In the end, his main concern outside his well-guarded private life was with his fellow professionals and with his craft. Whoever composed his death notice for the papers chose well when they described him, simply, as "actor". It was what he would have wanted.
Fergus Linehan is a novelist and former Irish Times arts editor