Actor Garrett Keogh goes deep into the heart of darkness for his latestrole, but it doesn't haunt him, he tells Peter Crawley
Sitting perfectly still at a table, his arms folded defiantly, a man eyeballs his accuser. Outside, the afternoon is bright and crisp, but the darkness in this rehearsal room is not easily alleviated. It seeps through this scene from Five Kinds of Silence, Shelagh Stephenson's harrowing play of incestuous abuse, as a daughter remonstrates against the figure of her murdered father, summoned up by her tortured memory.
"Sometimes I want to come into your grave and shoot you again," spits the actor Mary Murray. "Just to make sure."
As the scene ends, director Bairbre Ní Chaoimh offers the father some chilling approval. "It really helps when you smile, Garrett," she says. He stays silent. "It shows that you're still winning."
The next time Garrett Keogh smiles, it comes as a huge, if unexpected, relief. We are discussing the part of Billy he plays, a character so systematic in his patterns of mental, physical and sexual abuse that even in death he continues to dominate the lives of his wife and two daughters.
It would be comfortable to label Billy a monster, but Stephenson's complex and probing play does not afford the luxury of distance. Through layers of psychological corroboration we are exposed to the root causes of his pathology, uncovering a disturbed childhood and an obsessive need for control. It is an anatomy of brutality.
When rehearsals finish, can Keogh easily shrug it off? "It's intense," he says, "you get tired." By the end of the day he feels so exhausted, in fact, that "you'd think I'd been out digging a field". It's reassuring he doesn't take his work home with him, because Billy is quite a piece of work. "It doesn't haunt me," Keogh explains. His smile emerges from behind a dark goatee flecked with silver. "I don't have anything left to be haunted by."
This is as good a definition of catharsis as any you might find in Aristotle's theatrical treatise, The Poetics. It is also typical of Keogh, whose careful speech reveals a fluid, unaffected insight into the process and purpose of theatre, accrued through more than 30 years of performing experience.
"You see, it comes to the heart of what the theatrical act is," he will explain later. "People are moved by it. Now that is a strange and mysterious thing. When an audience and all of the people at work [in a play] come together in that moment, it has the ability to transport people. I'm not talking about a simple didactic role. It's not just about education."
Calypso's artistic director, Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, considers Stephenson's work (adapted by the English author from her original radio play) searingly relevant, even urgent. "I think catharsis is hugely important. If we are allowed to feel things, we can change our attitudes."
Sitting in their rehearsal room in Grangegorman, beside St Brendan's psychiatric hospital, Ní Chaoimh considers the unusual intensity of their rehearsal room. "I always think the best things to do in the theatre are the scariest," she ventures, then wonders aloud if Billy was a dangerous role to take on. "I don't know," Keogh shrugs. "I can't say I found it scary or dangerous. I found that I just had an immediate response to it." "You're not a 'safe' actor though," Ní Chaoimh replies enigmatically.
Beginning his career at the Abbey School of Acting in the 1970s, Keogh later became an Abbey company member, earning a degree in Economics and Politics from Trinity College along the way. He is winningly flippant about the many parts he has performed in the works of (among others) Brian Friel, Hugh Leonard, Tom Murphy and Conor McPherson (his cousin).
What qualifies as a favourite role? "At this stage it's the ones you remember," he laughs. He is certainly not given to sentimentality. "I do less and less theatre. I find it so demanding and so badly paid." His next job will be in The Abbey's The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney's adaptation of Antigone. "And to be honest, that will fill my theatrical fix for quite a long time to come."
He will also admit to a career informed equally by caution and impulsiveness, however, leaving some offers unanswered for months, leaping at the opportunity to accept others at extremely short notice. Similarly, he has an unusual ability to combine pragmatism and idealism within a single explanation of his career trajectory: "Look, if you can, you follow your heart."
"He has incredible courage as a performer," says Ní Chaoimh. "He will go to the limits. He will go into that darkness and go straight in there. Other actors would step back. There are some who might not take that leap."
Although this will be the first non-commissioned play staged by the socially committed theatre company, Ni Chaoimh finds it acutely pertinent, referring to the case of Sophia McColgan who's father was sentenced to 238 years in prison in 1995 for the serial rape and abuse of three of his four children.
He will be released two days before Calypso's production opens.
"The original play was inspired by an incident that happened in England," explains Ní Chaoimh, "where two daughters did shoot their father. But it has huge relevance for Ireland. For anywhere really."
There is, of course, a litany of statistics to prove the point, figures that seem to have moved from shocking news to sterile fact while the State's secret history of abuse continues to unravel. "One in five women suffer from domestic violence," says Ní Chaoimh. "That's a huge statistic. Domestic violence is perpetuated because there is this cult of silence around it - there's a shame in admitting that somebody hits you."
It is that same conspiracy of silence, she says, that continues to stigmatise the victims of sexual abuse. "Why is there a taboo around it? That makes it a 100 times harder for the person who has experienced sexual abuse to talk about it. So I do feel that [the play] has a huge urgency."
Calypso's 2002 production, Stolen Child, addressed the neglect and abuse of children in an industrial school, but the family is harder to infiltrate. "It's a private institution," she says. "It's behind closed doors." Exposing such abuse and campaigning for public awareness has long been the preserve of brave crusaders such as Sophia McColgan or Colm O'Gorman of One in Four ("The new heroes," says Ní Chaoimh. "People who are bringing us out of the dark ages.") Meanwhile support organisations such as the Rape Crisis Centres, Women's Aid and One in Four battle on in spite of severely limited resources.
What equips theatre to deal with such sensitive issues? "One of the ways that you would address the problem is to express it in a play like this," says Keogh, "and stimulate and involve people. Take it out from behind those closed door, talk about it." His director agrees. "If theatre can change the way that people think, people can change the world," says Ní Chaoimh. "You could watch a documentary and you might or might not be moved. You could read an article and stop halfway. But when somebody like Garrett embodies Billy or somebody like Úna Kavanagh embodies Susan [Billy's daughter], you relate to them as one human being to another. I think theatre can engage with the big things that are happening in the world, but they have to involve stories about human beings."
Ní Chaoimh avoids the danger of glibly discussing Stephenson's characters as victims, survivors or statistics. Discussing the plays psychological realism, however, is like negotiating a minefield. Stephenson's play may be convincing in its psychodynamics, but its spiral of victimhood, abuse, emotional detachment and passionless revenge unfurls with the bleak certainty of a worst-case scenario. Ní Chaoimh is careful not to suggest psychological or social absolutes. No, the victims of abuse do not invariably go on to perpetrate abuse. Yes, it's possible for survivors of abuse to recover and lead healthy lives. No, shooting the abuser is not the best solution.
Beyond the four members ofthe family depicted, and their awful inability to communicate, the fifth kind of silence belongs to the public. As one character puts it: "People were nearby, people we knew, and nobody said a word."
Just as the play aims to fill that silence, so Garrett Keogh feels his responsibility as an actor is to the words. "You don't have to commit genocide in Scotland to play Macbeth," he reasons. "The main thing you have to do, I think, is to honour the words that are written. If I come in with an attitude or a judgment about this character, I will distance myself as an actor from the part and I will therefore distance the audience from their involvement with it. I may as well give a lecture. And theatre is not about a lecture. Theatre is about reaching a level of understanding."
Five Kinds of Silence opens in Andrew's Lane Theatre, Dublin, on Thursday and runs until March 20th before transfering to the Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray, Co Wicklow, on 25th March