It's 10 years since Flo McSweeney was on stage, but the lack of glamour in her new role doesn't bother her at all, she tells Arminta Wallace
'The last major thing I did on stage was A Midsummer Night's Dream, where I played a temptress," muses Flo McSweeney, settling into an armchair at the Westbury Hotel and tucking one leg under the other for good measure. "Now, 10 years on, here I am playing an auld one."
Come June, McSweeney will play the role of Anna Cassidy in Alastair McGuckian's musical The Ha'penny Bridge - and her costume will, to put it mildly, be a far cry from the hand-painted, skin-tight body stocking she sported as Shakepeare's fairy queen.
"I'll have this brown wig with a parting down the middle and it's a real - you know, a horrible - brown," she says, sketching something large and shapeless in the air above her head. "Right down over the ears, with a big chignon bun at the back; and a scratchy wool skirt and a shawl."
Wait a second. A brown wig and a shawl? Isn't "glamorous" Flo McSweeney's middle name? Wasn't she the epitome of rock chic when she sang with Moving Hearts? And then, as a presenter on the RTÉ travel programme No Frontiers, the sort of ultra-cool customer her audience aspired to be? McSweeney throws back her head and laughs.
"In my 20s that wig would have really bothered me," she says. "I would have refused the role. Now, when I'm going out, I just check myself" - she does a harassed-mum inspection of both shoulders - "to see have I got any yogurt on me. If I put on make-up, it's done in the car. It's funny, really. Those 10 years have passed in the flick of an eye, but I'm a very different person now."
What has made the difference is life, in the shape of marriage - to Barry Après Match Murphy - and some very happy years at home with their children, Luke and Mia. More recently, life dealt a sideways swipe with the death of her father, which has clearly affected her deeply. But she says it was her dad who, more than anyone, got her into The Ha'penny Bridge.
"Kevin Hough, the casting director, is a friend of mine, and he called me in January and said they were having auditions. I did the audition for a laugh - and I think that was really in my favour, because I went in and had a great sing, and I knew the pianist and everything."
When she was called back for a second audition and people started choosing keys for songs, it dawned on her that she was going to be offered the part. "And I felt it would be very difficult - I mean, my son is eight and my daughter is three. I had been doing a lot of voiceover work, which meant I could be at home."
It was her father who, when she tried to talk herself out of it, egged her on. "He was on the phone to me every day saying: 'If you don't do it, on opening night you'll be sitting at home watching telly and someone else will be playing your part.' "
So now it's her part. But what sort of part, exactly?
"I play Anna Cassidy," she says. "She's married to Peader, who's . . . well, a bit of a messer. She's the person everyone in the tenements goes to for advice - or when they need a drop of milk. She's quite strong, and very stoic. Then her daughter falls in love with this English guy - and it's 1922 . . ."
The press release for the musical helpfully fills in the plot synopsis: "In a historical period of heightened nationalistic tension, greed, deceit, jealousy and love are mixed with dramatic consequences." And, McSweeney adds, there are some wonderful songs. "I'm quite excited by it, because I've never done musical theatre before."
ON THE OTHER hand, almost everything she has done in her career has been a combination of music and theatre - to some degree. Somebody recently gave her a copy of a documentary about Aidan Walsh, in the course of which she interviewed him for the RTÉ television show Megamix.
"He was a singer who used to ride everywhere on a white horse," she explains. "I was about 23, and I suppose I thought I was very cool. I had this 'Flock of Seagulls' hair thing, and I was throwing the microphone around and looking bored. Almost chewing gum, you know? Going, like, 'Yeah, whatever'. It's hilarious to watch it. In our 20s we were just so image-conscious. And every band in Dublin had a record deal, or a publishing deal, or some class of a deal. Everybody had money and everybody was down in the Pink Elephant seven nights a week pouting and looking sulky. It's only when you look back on stuff like that that you realise how different you are now."
Posing, of course, is an integral part of the rock and pop business. The vibe in traditional music is rather different - although as the singer who replaced Christy Moore in Moving Hearts at the height of the band's fame, McSweeney found herself at the showbiz end, rather than the sessions-in-obscure-pubs end, of the trad spectrum.
"Well, they are different worlds, and the people in trad are different from the people in the rock business," she says. "But when you're on the road, a band is a band, you know? Everyone does what they have to do to survive. When I was in my early 30s I had no job, and I ended up doing backing vocals for the touring band called The Commitments."
This spin-off from the huge success of Alan Parker's film saw McSweeney spend a year and a half touring in the US, Europe and - bizarrely - the United Arab Emirates.
"It put me off singing for life, to be honest," she says. "It's a terrible thing to say, but every time I hear Andrew Strong singing Mustang Sally it brings me back there. Not that he was on the tour. But - yuck." She shudders. "There were 15 of us on a tour bus - two of whom were women. You'd spend 10 or 11 days at a time doing your gig and getting back on the bus, with maybe one hotel a week - if you were lucky. It just got harder and harder to go on stage and be clean. Then, back on to the smelly old bus. It was horrendous. Never, ever again."
No Frontiers represented a more salubrious kind of travel opportunity.
"Ferdia MacAnna suggested me as a presenter," she says, "and the producer just phoned me up. I agreed to do one story, to see how it would go. I went to France. It was a doddle. Then they phoned again. Barry was in Edinburgh at the festival and I was in a taxi with Luke, who was 20 months old, on my way to the airport to go and see him and I got a call saying: 'Can you go to Zimbabwe next week?' "
She eventually worked on four consecutive series, leaving only when she got pregnant with Mia. And if anybody tells you, she says with a grin, that working on a travel programme is glamorous - well.
"You can't whinge or complain, because people just look at you," she says. "But as budgets are cut, every year there's a bit more sliced off. The first year we spent three or four days in each place, which gave us a day to recover. By the end we were shooting in two days regardless of where we were going. I went to Sydney on a Wednesday and I was back home in Dublin the following Monday - having climbed Sydney Harbour Bridge in the meantime. I was in flitters. People ask me do I regret giving it up, or miss it, but I really don't. I was really happy to hand over to Kathryn Thomas, because she came along and she was just right and she does a great job." Another huge grin.
GLAMOUR, THOUGH. MAYBE it depends how you define it. "I remember flying over Victoria Falls in a helicopter, and seeing three elephants - a bull and a mother and a baby - all walking along the edge of the falls, with a rainbow underneath us. And I remember looking out - while holding on to the trousers of the cameraman, who was doing a kamikaze act, hanging out of the helicopter - and just thinking: 'Hold this moment. Because some day you'll be back scrubbing the kitchen floor.' "
Scrubbing the kitchen floor doesn't sound very "celebrity". But even before the c-word is out, McSweeney is shaking her head vigorously.
"Oh, I'm not a celebrity at all," she says. "I'd hate it. And Barry hates it even more than I do. We've been asked several times to have our house photographed, all that sort of thing, and we just say no. I'd hate to trot out my kids or have people come into my house. We're very ordinary. Suburbanites. It's funny, because when you're young you want to be successful - and success means fame. But now, in my 40s, I don't crave that at all. I look on The Ha'penny Bridge as a job, not a huge career move. People are saying it could go to Broadway. And it could, too. But I just haven't thought about that."
The Ha'penny Bridge previews at the Cork Opera House on Jun 10 and opens at the Point, Dublin, on Jun 14