Acting is a profession, a job, but it's also a compulsion says Derbhle Crotty. Sara Keatingreports.
DERBHLE CROTTY speaks like a writer, with a rich, poetic turn of phrase. When I mention this she is mortified, apologising for "the state of my metaphors" with an embarrassed laugh.
But she goes on to draw a constructive comparison between the art of acting and the act of writing: "We're all just working with language, really, trying to communicate something. Writers do it with words, and actors bring the playwright's words to life with their voices and their bodies."
Crotty commands a distinctive earthy energy and, after a long day in rehearsals, she is alert and fiercely intelligent company, as well versed in history and politics as she is in all aspects of the theatre.
Currently performing in Brian Friel's translation of Three Sisters at the Abbey, and about to begin rehearsals for An Ideal Husband, she is excited about the exhausting prospect of the next few months. "One of the things that I enjoy so much about the theatre is that marathon aspect," she says. "Rehearsing by day. Performing by night. And it is always great security to know the next thing you're doing, because then even the small amount of time you have off is heaven."
Crotty grew up in "small-town Cavan, but I didn't experience it as oppressive, like you often hear about the midlands. I actually really enjoyed my schooldays. All the same I couldn't wait to get out to a bigger place."
Moving to college in Dublin to study law "was my go at the big wild world", but while she finished up her degree with honours it was her experience at UCD's Dramsoc that marked the turning point in the direction of her life.
"When I moved to Dublin," she explains, "I had no idea how you would even start to be an actor. I had always enjoyed performing at home, in school plays, but I didn't know that it could be a profession. Then I discovered Dramsoc, and we read and put on plays and heard lectures by working actors like Rosaleen Linehan and then, in my final year, I did a late audition for the Samuel Beckett Centre and I was accepted and that was that."
The decision to change direction in her life, she says, was easy, a "no-brainer. There was something about it that made me feel even more alive."
It was the training she received at Trinity, however, that "allowed me to be so brave, to go for it. Acting is often seen as an amateur profession - if you'll forgive the contradiction - but it is not something short-term that you can just learn. "There is much love and care and trouble taken but, most of all, it is a lot of hard work. You're putting in 14 hours a day. You devote yourself to it. It is an extraordinary commitment - by the tutors as well as the students."
Crotty seems genuinely outraged that Trinity's acting programme has closed.
"When I was starting out, I didn't know how you went about becoming an actor, and now that people know the steps you need to take, the training you have to have, now that the structures are properly developed, they've been taken away. And it is harder now for young actors, because directors increasingly require that people are trained. Sometimes it can be a prerequisite of being seen."
The closure "betrays an extraordinary lack of foresight", she continues, "and a real lack of confidence in the importance of the arts. Of course the Gaiety school will still run, but the Beckett centre was part of the public university system, and you could legitimately get grants, and apply for funding towards your education. That's important for some students. Especially when the job prospects are so uncertain."
While Crotty is refreshingly candid about her own experiences of professional insecurity, she does not over-dramatise them. "It was always thus," she insists, "and we are not the first generation to have such worries. But I always think of Bill Nighy when I have such fears. Having been warned about how hard acting is and the long stages of unemployment, he thought to himself 'how brilliant! That's the job for me!'
"That's how I like to think of 'resting' - although actors themselves never use that term. But when I was younger I did find it very difficult, although I'm a lot more comfortable with the way it works now, and I always believe that I'll work again, and that I'll continue to work. That's not to say that there won't be times when I won't, but I always believe that I will."
Having spent five years living in London, Crotty is determined that the core base for her future work should be in Ireland, "The Dublin theatre scene is great. It is like working with a ready-made ensemble: you've almost always worked with someone before, either the actors or director or designer, so there's an understanding there.
"And in England, theatre is more about the ladder: once you're on one rung you can't climb down again and you feel you have to follow each role with one of greater magnitude. That makes theatre a career not an art and I don't like that. Yes, acting's a profession, a job, but it's also a compulsion, and what's important in life - your values - is important in art."
If that sounds idealistic, there is a romantic quality to Crotty's description of the craft of acting too, and she cringes a little as she elucidates her approach - "those metaphors again" - although her passion is obviously genuine.
"As an actor," she explains, "you mediate your life through your art: you're an actor all the time. But you have to have a shifting centre. It's difficult to talk about it, because it's an abstract thing but, most importantly, you need to be emotionally malleable, you need to be open.
"Empathy: that is the cardinal rule. Acting is not about stepping inside another person, but feeling for another person. It is a question of character really, but I don't mean playing a character, or even being a character.
"Character isn't just what you do, or talk about, but how you feel, the way that you feel, and that's true in life as well as on stage. That's the essence of what an actor has to capture."
There are more practical methodologies too, and Crotty enjoys researching roles as much as "trying them on like a skin".
Even so, she adds, "research is not always from a particularly logical point of view. Sometimes it is actually just reading around a play, to see how the writer comes to that idea. I am genuinely fascinated with creativity - the act of discovery."
Working on a new piece of work is the most enjoyable, if unpredictable, way to engage with this discovery, "like for me, with Portia Coughlan. The writer is in the room and, sometimes, they're still writing, adapting the play this way and that according to what's going on in rehearsals, and you're all just experimenting, not sure what's going to happen.
"And, there you are, in the middle of it all, the first ever person to find this character and put her on the stage, and it's really febrile, the pulse quickening all the time."
Although Crotty has worked on film and television, it is that pulse, that liveliness, of the theatre that is her first, and her real, love.
"Theatre makes you feel alive, in a very profound way. And there's the thrill of knowing that the audience are alive too. That they are actually real people, sitting there in front for you and that you could reach out and touch them, and they could reach out and touch you.
"And for the audience as much as the actors it's a contract of compassion. You walk on stage, and you're giving them an invitation: asking 'Shall we?'"
She laughs wryly, embarrassed again. "I suppose you could say, I'm a true believer."
Three Sisters continues at the Abbey Theatre, until Aug 2. An Ideal Husband opens at the Abbey Theatre on Aug 11
