To the cosy bar area of the Peacock Theatre in central Dublin. Odd chairs. Domestic coffee tables. You could feel yourself in the modest livingroom of a late 20th century flat. I like it.
Kate Gilmore, star of the new play Safe House, settles in and talks up a force 10 gale. She has already had a busy career. But this one-woman show feels like her biggest challenge yet.
“Different shows bring their own challenges, but this kind of feels like a culmination of all of those asks and demands,” she says. “My dad actually only asked me this last week: ‘Do you think you’d have been able to do this five years ago?’ And the answer is no.”
Reading the notes, one can see where she is coming from. A collaboration between Enda Walsh, tireless Irish writer, and Anna Mullarkey, versatile musician, Safe House, as the publicity material has it, works through “song, music, recorded voice, and film”. A cinematic “teaser trailer” plays sombre electronic beats over a zoom from geostationary orbit to bird’s eye view of an unremarkable junction.
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I went to the cinema to see Small Things Like These. By the time I emerged I had concluded the film was crap
“It’s very hard to define, because I’ve never seen anything like it,” Gilmore says. “It’s like a new form. It’s about a life. It’s about an entire life. The multimedia includes parts of this person’s life from way back in her past to her recent past to the present. It’s a mishmash of all of the times that led her to become who she is.”
Even if the piece, set at a handball alley in 1996, weren’t so challenging in form, there would still be an unusual amount of pressure on Gilmore. Any new work by Walsh is an event. Since his breakthrough nearly 30 years ago with Disco Pigs – the piece that launched Cillian Murphy – the Dubliner has been consistently breaking rules in all available media. In a few weeks’ time his film adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, starring old mate Cillian and directed by Tim Mielants, will hit Irish screens. As we are talking, he bursts into the ersatz livingroom with his gregarious dog Alvin.
“She’s amazing!” Walsh says, gesturing towards Gilmore.
She has certainly made a lot of the last decade. Raised in Artane to the north of Dublin – where she still lives – Gilmore trained at the Gaiety School of Acting and Bow Street Academy before going on to roles, both at The Gate, in The Great Gatsby and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. She landed a regular part, and ultimately met a bloody end, in Fair City. More theatre work followed. There are no obvious gaps in the CV. Collaborators rave about her. If anything, the opportunity to own the stage on her own feels overdue.
The Peacock is the smaller, more experimental corner of the Abbey Theatre block. I wonder what recollections she has of the National Theatre.
“I have a particular memory of bringing my grandad to the Risen People,” she says, referencing the theatre’s 2013 production of a James Plunkett play. “He was born in 1922 and grew up a stone’s throw from here, but had never been here. He was in his 70s when I brought him for the first time. That stands out to me as a memory, because it felt like we were coming home: being from Dublin 1 and never having been to the National Theatre. I felt: I can introduce you the way my college introduced me.”
That last line is interesting. Gilmore tells me that, though she knew from early on she wanted to be an actor, she didn’t spend much time at the theatre when growing up. “I was old when I first went to the theatre because it was just not in my family at all,” she says.
So where did that urge come from?
“Honestly, if I try and think about it, I really don’t know,” she says. “It was written in the stars. I’m an only child. So I had to have an active imagination. I had to keep myself occupied. I started to really love film from a very young age. I loved quite odd films for my age. I remember loving The Piano when I was 13. My parents were like: ‘There is something about her that’s a bit different. We don’t know what it is yet, but we will let her figure it out.’”
Gilmore went to a “stage-schoolish place” where she learned that she wasn’t going to be a dancer. But she loved acting out scenes. She did youth theatre. Before long it seemed she was locked on to a rail. “By the time I left school there was really no other option for me,” she says. “People were talking about CAO forms and backup plans and this and that. I had no backup plans. That naivety!”
Gilmore has already demonstrated startling versatility. In 2018 she was striking as Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme, the former Manson Family member who later tried to assassinate Gerald Ford, in the Gate’s production of Sondheim’s Assassins. I remember having a “who’s that?” moment when she embarked on the chilling Unworthy of Your Love duet. The performance required an eerie combination of ingenuousness and sly wit.
“A lot of the work I’ve done, and still continue to do, was new work which presents its own beauty and opportunity and challenge,” she remembers. “But something like Sondheim, which is the musical theatre equivalent to Shakespeare, is amazing. Nothing here is going to waste. No punctuation. No notes. Nothing goes to waste. Within that you find your own way.”
She has already spoken about the hazards of leaping without any backup plan. But she did secure something like a regular job with the gig as Karen O’Neill in Fair City. I have spoken to a number of actors – Australians in particular – who have no reservation in celebrating the education they get from soap operas. Julianne Moore is similarly grateful for her time on As the World Turns. You learn how to work quickly, how to get an immediate grasp on a character, how to get it right on the first take.
He is not at all protective. His leadership style is pretty remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a process like it
— Kate Gilmore
“Yeah, it is really the only stable job in this industry,” Gilmore says. “It is a gift for an actor – and extremely educational. You learn from it every week. You get the scripts on Monday for that week. You don’t know what’s coming around for you. You will have been booked for a certain amount of days – come in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.”
So you then know you won’t die on Wednesday?
“Yeah. Ha, ha! You have to learn fast. You have to change what you think if you grow attached to a character. Often, I’ve heard people say, ‘My character wouldn’t do this. My character wouldn’t do that.’ You have to get rid of all of that and think to yourself: well, that character is a human being – and I surprise myself every day.”
So many of Gilmore’s contemporaries have made the jump to London. It is now easier, with online communication, to maintain an acting career from anywhere in the world, but there remains, for many, an inclination to cross the Irish Sea. Artane has retained Kate Gilmore. She bravely takes her scooter into the city each day, no doubt running lines as she dodges puddles. I wonder if anything might draw her overseas. There is quite a community of Irish performers in the English capital.
“I would move to London. But I think I would like to move with a project that was going – a stage show or something,” she says. “I was going to go before the pandemic and do something in the Donmar [Warehouse theatre] and then that happened. I think it would be worth relocating for a while to see what would happen there.”
An articulate engaged woman with an enthusiastic smile, Gilmore long ago established herself within the industry. She won an Irish Times theatre award for her performance in John MacKenna’s Breathless a decade ago. The Peacock may be a smallish space, but it feels as if Safe House could open still more doors for her. Being alone at the centre matters. Enda Walsh’s name matters. The author of The Walworth Farce, the stage version of Once and the screenplay for Steve McQueen’s Hunger draws worldwide notice. He is also directing the piece.
“He is not at all protective,” she says. “His leadership style is pretty remarkable. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a process like it. It’s so incredibly collaborative. What everyone in the room has to say is valid.”
I imagine she doesn’t regret not developing that backup plan when she left college.
“I’m looking at friends who went the other way and have normal jobs and normal lives and electric cars in their driveway and mortgages,” she says. “Then I look at myself – no mortgage and my car is falling apart. I have no money in the bank. But I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to feel the way I do every day when I’m working on something.”
Safe House is at The Peacock, Dublin until November 16th
