Aisling O’Sullivan says working with Martin McDonagh is ‘high wire acting’ (2024)

About halfway through my conversation with Aisling O’Sullivan the topic of The Banshees of Inisherin comes up. “I loved it,” the actress says, nursing a glass of water in a corner of the Gaiety Theatre’s empty bar. “I guess you throw your own interpretations on things — but for me I was so moved by the debate about ‘Can you be a great artist and maintain a normal life, or do you have to sacrifice to make something extraordinary and beautiful? And what is the important thing at the end of the day: is it that or what happens to the people around you if you’re striving for that?’ So that’s kind of what I got from it.” She sits back, musing on the topic. “I won’t go chopping off my fingers, though.”

Martin McDonagh’s latest feature film is a relevant discussion point, considering the Kerry-born actress is about to begin rehearsals for the Irish premiere of McDonagh’s 2015 play Hangmen. Although she will get to keep all of her digits intact, it is likely to be as intense a piece of work as any of the London-born playwright’s work. Alongside a cast that includes the Love/Hate star Killian Scott (making his professional theatre debut) and Denis Conway, she will play Alice, the wife of the chief hangman Harry Wade, who is being forced into retirement with the abolition of capital punishment in the UK.

“I haven’t seen it, no,” O’Sullivan says. “But what a fantastic premise: the last day of hanging, and the chief hangman is out of a job, basically. I have some ideas about Alice,” she adds with a knowing look, “so I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.”

O’Sullivan is friendly but with an undeniably intense gaze, a deep thinker who is prone to long pauses before delivering her answer. The result is that almost everything she says sounds profound and carefully weighted — qualities that have benefited her successful stage and screen career, both in Ireland and abroad. Much of her stage work has been in McDonagh’s plays, in fact: she is attracted to what she calls “the danger” of it.

“It’s high-wire acting,” she says, nodding. “I read Bono’s book recently, Surrender, which was amazing — and he writes about ‘staying inside the song’. It’s the same with any play you work on, but staying inside Martin’s work … there’s a lot going on in you to maintain the integrity of what he’s getting at. The big ideas, it appears to me from working on them, bubble up underneath everything that you’re working hard at. But you kind of have to forget about the big idea. It’ll come up; it’s like a magic potion, or something.” She grins, pleased at the analogy. “If everyone’s doing their job in the right way, and doing the right thing, the magic idea will come up.”

Her first experience of McDonagh’s work was in The Cripple of Inishmaan at the National Theatre in London, in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner in 1997.

“Oh my God, what a great experience,” she enthuses. “It was my first introduction to Martin, and he was really only beginning — so we were all in the same boat. Nicholas Hytner, who went on to lead the National Theatre, was a brilliant director, and we had a fantastic company. And Martin’s plays … you can lean into them. They give you joy because of how skilfully he writes, and his brilliance.”

Growing up in rural Kerry, there was no real opportunity to pursue acting as a career, although O’Sullivan credits her “artistically minded” parents for instilling her with an early love of performing. As a child she used to say that she wanted to be a physiotherapist: “I didn’t even know what it was, it was just the delight of saying it,” she says, chuckling. “I could see adults were impressed when I said it, so it had some magical quality — but I had no idea what it meant.”

Instead she went on to study marketing and design in Dublin, but knew that she would eventually find her way into acting. In her mid-twenties she was hired for her first role at the Abbey Theatre by Druid’s Garry Hynes, and hasn’t looked back since.

“Acting is a gift of some sort,” she muses. “It’s some sort of strange thing that your brain can do. I always think of artists: there’s that great painting over there of John B Keane that I was looking at just before you came in,” she says, gesturing to an impressive portrait of the famous playwright and friends on the wall of the bar by the artist Cian McLoughlin. “Oh my God, he really got them; the movement of them, and the joy and the love of them. I recognise them, I’ve met them. And that’s just paint, from his head …” she says, shaking her head in wonderment and shrugging, “and he did it.”

O’Sullivan has featured in some of Keane’s work too, most notably as the titular Big Maggie at the Gaiety in 2016. She says she made a decision “to lean into theatre” at a certain point in her career, having returned from a decade in London and with a number of TV credits in Irish dramas such as The Clinic and Raw under her belt. Now, she says, she is tempted to swing back the other way and pursue more TV work again.

“There’s another ‘lean’ happening,” she admits. “Raw and The Clinic were amazing experiences, and it kind of was at a time where there wasn’t really streaming or anything, so there was a lot of focus on those roles. And now, with streaming, there’s a lot more happening.”

Irish TV drama has changed radically over the past decade too, O’Sullivan says, and she is heartened to see older actresses making their mark.

“I particularly love seeing women of a certain age, the actresses that are out there now,” she agrees. “I think representation is so crucial, and anyone who wants to see themselves represented has to row in behind the people who are representing them. If there’s a magazine with someone who looks like you or is in your bracket, buy the magazine. That’s how I approach it now, how I vote. So it’s brilliant, and I’m so excited for the Oscars coming up, as well. It’s kind of incredible: Ireland is such a small country, but we pack a huge punch.”

The conversation turns back around to the Oscars; she is equally effusive in her praise for the “masterpiece” An Cailín Ciúin. Although O’Sullivan featured in McDonagh’s Oscar-winning 2004 short film debut, Six Shooter, I wonder aloud why her success in his plays has not yet translated to roles in his feature films for her.

“I would like to be [cast], yeah,” she says, shrugging. “But I guess if there’s no part for you, that’s the bottom line. I know him from way back, but we don’t speak every day, or anything like that. But I know him and love him, and I’m so proud of where he’s at, and who he is, and what he has achieved. But I wouldn’t ever think like that. Unless somebody’s going to write something for you, the right person for the part ends up in the part.”

Nevertheless, following Hangmen she is keen to pursue work further afield — perhaps in America, having developed a recent interest in American playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill. Her work has taken her Stateside many times in the past, including a US tour of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, and in 2019 when she made her Broadway debut in a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. She is aware that the success of The Banshees of Inisherin may well bring more people through the door of the Gaiety Theatre to see the first Irish production of Hangmen, but is undaunted by the prospect. In fact, she says, she relishes it.

“[King Lear] was the last big job before everything got locked down on Broadway,” she says. “It was with a phenomenal cast, and there was massive pressure and expectation around it — but, really, we were just people in a room, trying to grapple with Shakespeare and tell a story. I mean, you do have to grapple with fear, and you really do have to slay that dragon: fear will always come.

“But with Hangmen we’ll all want to do our best, we’ll all be trying to do our best, and we’ll all be trying to serve this magnificent piece. We want that big idea to bubble up — so that’s what our focus will be on, and to keep that fear at bay. It’s like we’re athletes.” She smiles. “We’re preparing for that; you know the foe will be there too, so you just try to focus on the friend.”

Hangmen, Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, Mar 11-Apr 8; gaietytheatre.iehttps://gaietytheatre.ie

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