Interview with Eamon Morrissey

In an in-depth interview with Seamus Cashman, Eamon Morrissey talks about his life and career, his craft and how he has shaped it.

Q: To start back before you were celebrated as an actor - it must be very different from your early days to now. What is the difference in approach to what you do?

Eamon: Of course, they are entirely different worlds. When I became an actor at the beginning of the 1960s (late '59 / '60), it was a very bohemian kind of thing to do; you were almost leaving the tribe to go and join this bohemian world, as it was seen. To be an actor then was to be a bohemian! Nobody wanted to do it. Nowadays so many people want to be actors. Everything has changed, of course. One of the major changes is that standards have got higher and higher; which is good. More time is spent on rehearsal, more work goes into it, and there is an immense amount of young talent around.

Q: Is that a challenge for you now being older?

Eamon: No, the younger actors have a certain respect for age, at least to my face! But I wouldn’t like to be starting again now. I think it considerably more difficult to succeed now. Which is true of most professions now, I suppose. It can be heavy going now to find a foothold in the theatre. But it was really hard then – the idea of trying to bring up a family of two kids on the vagaries of an actor’s salary was a giant challenge.

Q: What drove you to do it?

Eamon: I just always wanted to. I think, in later years, perhaps my mother, who was very fond of the theatre, she encouraged me a bit – I used to go around doing the Feis Ceoil and things like that. Doing drama pieces and being in competitions. In fact, there was an occasion in a Father Matthew Feis, in the Under-Elevens for a dramatic piece, I got the silver medal, second prize; the first prize went to Brenda Fricker!  We joke about it. I say she can have her Oscar, but I am still jealous of that gold medal!

I’ve been at it since then. I was very dissatisfied in school at Synge Street; it just didn’t suit me. I got a chance to become a stage manager and a bit player in ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ with Siobhan McKenna and Donal Donnelly in 1960, so I didn’t actually finish my schooling. It was the year before my leaving certificate. I went for it and just took it up from there. I hated being stage manager. I had no intention of working in that side of theatre. And I was the worst stage manager in the world. I got fired eventually.

Things were happening, bits and pieces here and there. Telefís Éireann had started up in 1961, and that was a great help. I remember in my childhood in Ranelagh watching from the bedroom window the RTE television mast growing higher, day by day. I used to look out and dream that maybe someday I would be transmitted from the top of that mast!

But, like every Irish actor then and since, I went to London to be a star and became a barman. Par for the course. And backwards and forwards doing bits here and doing bits there. And then ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!’ had its first production in the Gaiety in 1964. Then it was to go to America, but only three or four of the cast were going, and not me. I was only playing a small part. So when they did the pre-Broadway tour, the guy playing my part didn’t have the right Cavan accent. He had an Arizona accent! So I got a phone call out of the blue while I was working in the Eblana, saying something like ‘Will you come to Broadway tomorrow?’ That started a whole new life for me. I was young, just twenty-three or twenty-four. The whole play was about separation of generations, of fathers and sons, and the gap between them. That is why it had such appeal in Broadway. America was experiencing a change in father/son relationships.

Q: Do you think that gap, that sense of generation difference then in Ireland, is any different from the generation differences there now?

Eamon: Well, every generation has its differences obviously, but I think there were bigger differences then. The Ireland that I grew up in was that very cold grey Dublin orthodoxy and authority in the 1950s. I will never forget the excitement of getting to New York in 1966, I think it was. The sheer freedom and excitement that was there and the idea that you were able to have a point of view and an opinion when you weren’t yet forty! You really were not supposed to have opinions if you were under forty in Ireland then! The difference between New York and Dublin is that huge energy – absolutely, massive energy - though Dublin has become now much the same. I just love Manhattan. I was then back there again with ‘Lovers’ in 1968. I lived there for three or four years. I loved New York but I’m very glad I didn’t stay there because it would kill me! You sleep a third less, you drink a third more; you do everything but settle down!

Q: Then what do you see within the gap now between the older and the younger generation?

Eamon: Then the authority was without doubt very strong. Now? Well I think it’s easier now. I don’t know whether this is only personal experience, but obviously our relationships with our children are much more open than before. Not that my parents were closed (they were quite the reverse) but that kind of formality is gone and I notice with the grandchildren, that father and children relationship now is an altogether different one to what was standard in my time. From the young towards the old and the old to towards young also – it goes both directions.

Q: What, then, is the older contributing to the young generation now or is that lost?

Eamon: I don’t think so. There is a basic change. The people who are now older are children of the 1960s and they came through those freer times. So they are, by their nature, different people to the generation before them, and they see their roles differently. As regards children, Ann and I thought that, when grown up, they would be gone – but sure you’re never finished with them! They still are your children. You still lie awake at night wondering how they will solve this or that problem. Caring about them doesn’t go away and it would be very unnatural if it did.

Q: After you came back to Dublin from New York ...?

Eamon: I started doing ‘Newsbeat’ which turned into ‘Hall’s Pictorial Weekly’. It’s amazing how it is still remembered so fondly. For people of a certain age, it still is part of folk history in Ireland. Then I started putting the material together for a solo show called ‘The Brother’ based on the writings of Myles na gCopaleen. It opened in the Peacock Theatre and has endured through the years – all about the atomic dangers of bicycles, and why ‘a pint of plain is your only man’, and Ireland of the forties and fifties. It has taken me from Dublin to Edinburgh to Sydney, and many places in between, on stage and television. I’m touring it again this year – thirty-six years later! Back in February 1974, if I only got the three weeks I expected out of it, I’d have been happy!

I did two more one-man shows, ‘Patrick Gulliver’, from the writings of Jonathan Swift, and ‘Joycemen’, with characters from Joyce's Ulysses. In all three shows, I have noticed that the ability of today’s audience to listen has changed. We don’t have the ability to listen for as long as was the norm years ago. Probably because we’re bamboozled with visual images being fired at us all over the place. People want visuals to explain things, so I adapted and changed the shows to accommodate that.

The thing about the solo show is that it is actually the most absorbing form of theatre for me. Every bit of your body, mind and spirit are all involved to make this one second progress to the next second to the next second. It is very fulfilling; very tiring but definitely fulfilling.  What makes the stage the most exciting form of acting is this live interaction with an audience. You’ve got to be fresh. You may have been doing the show for thirty-six years but the audience on this particular night is as entitled to enjoy it every bit as much as the first night audience. It’s about keeping that standard going. So you’re constantly looking to change, to adapt, to move forward. One of the things I don’t allow myself is to make changes on the instant. I have discussions after the show, with myself as actor and with myself as director, asking what can I change, will I put this in or that? 

Q: You’re an older actor now ...?

Eamon: I know I’m getting older of course, I got the free travel pass – I’m delighted with it! I thought I would slow down a bit and take it easy. But suddenly it all started up again. I’m involved with 'The Brother', involved in 'Fair City'; I’m busier than I’ve been for a long time and I’m actually enjoying every bit of it. You may find that you get tired quicker, you can’t work the same long hours at a time perhaps; but you adapt to that and deal with it. There is no question but that there is as much excitement now as there was when I started out. Of course, Irish theatre and television have come a long way since the sixties. There were good things going on in Irish theatre back then certainly. But there is great theatre writing happening right now, and our contribution to international film and television is huge.

Q: How different is it to be working in television?

Eamon:  Doing work for TV is very different to working on stage. It is an entirely a different medium obviously. When doing something like Fair City, with such pressure on to get four episodes done a week, there’s a great sense of achievement in getting it done right. There’s an old saying about TV: ‘I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday.’ But, at the same time, the sense of achievement in getting things right is even greater, and I enjoy that side of it.

I’ve always loved the comic roles, of course. Naturally, I’d say there’s no difference between straight and comic acting. You’ve got to be straight to be comic. And all comedy is based on some kind of reality, so it is the same type of acting. I suppose I carry that into daily life too – seeing the humour a bit more than others might. Not when I wake up with a hangover, of course! I suppose I look at life slightly differently. This detached observer – you don’t want to be too conscious of it but you really need to be, consciously or subconsciously, a detached observer. That’s a thing I’ve always done and still do. I’m very fond of walking around Dublin, wandering the streets, just observing what’s happening.

In 'Fair City', I play a very interesting character called Cass. He’s just a guy who's wandering about, very much a creature of the sixties, who's returned to Carrigstown to settle down. He’s slightly odd, and does things differently. He has little or nothing in the world, and it doesn’t worry him. If he can get somebody to buy him a pint, that’s great. He has a dog which happens to be my little dog. You know, my dog has become more famous than me now!

TV soap is huge. I was never a soap person and before I went in to 'Fair City', I really didn’t see an awful lot of it. But, naturally, when I knew I was going to get involved, I started to follow it. It does get to you; you begin to say ‘Oh, look at that! What’s she going to do now!’ It does generate this instant response. 'Fair City' is very popular; there’s never less than half-a-million people watching it, sometimes over 650,000.

Q: Do you watch you own performances on TV?

Eamon: I watch myself on TV from a professional point of view, to see how it is working out. Which, of cours,e you can’t do with a play on stage! But there is a part of you, an alter-ego, that sits in the audience and watches you while you’re on stage; keeps a check on you. If there isn’t, there should be. I’ve directed plays as well so I’m inclined to have a director’s look at how a performance is developing. In fact, way back when I did the ‘Joycemen’ show in the seventies, I used to rehearse by myself in the Abbey when everyone was on holidays. I had the whole rehearsal room to myself. I used to wear out my two ‘stage managers’, and then I’d go into Kennedy’s, have a pint and write notes and stuff for myself. I would read the notes to myself going in on the train in the morning. Separating myself from it like that is a process of learning really. There’s nobody else trying to shape where you’re going with a solo show. It is very important that it does have a shape.

Q: What might you have to say to older people who want to be involved in theatre?

Eamon: One of the purposes of rehearsals is to allow you gauge how much energy you are going to need to get through. And you gauge how much energy you have and you match the two so you don’t wind up half-way through in a ball of sweat! That’s important to know for an older person getting involved in theatre. If you find yourself thinking 'suppose this goes wrong, or this' – well, you can’t go down that negative road. There’s an old Victorian book on acting which has this great bit of advice: ‘There’s nothing to equal a passing familiarity with the text.’ Always know where you are!

As an Ambassador for Bealtaine for three years now, I realise just how important this festival of creativity is. Initially when asked, I said to myself 'Why not, it seems a good and worthy thing'. But the more involved I am, the more important I realise it is. Bealtaine is a wonderful movement. It is so good for older people to get out and do something creative. The brain is just waiting to be stimulated. It is a fact that whatever effort you put into whatever medium you work in, creativity will reward you and give you back so much more than you put in. From my experience of meeting groups involved in Bealtaine activities, it’s amazing to see the excitement generated and the energy and the outlook on life people involved have. Really good.

This year’s theme ‘To have dreams and to speak them without fear’ is wonderful. Just what people might use as an approach to creativity and involvement; it’s exactly the approach to find. I would like to see as many people as possible trying to express themselves in whatever form of creativity they choose. It will reward you; you will gain more than you can imagine. It is so important for people not to think, ‘Ah sure it’s too late for me to start doing anything like that.’ No, it’s not too late, it is never too late.