Meet Stephen Rea, Ireland’s solo powerhouse

Beloved actor Stephen Rea is bringing his brilliant staging of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape to the Adelaide Festival. As is standard for anyone interviewing this national treasure, I’ve been instructed not to ask questions about Dolours Price.

Stephen Rea in Krapp’s Last Tape. Picture: Pato Cassinoni

The Irish actor Stephen Rea is at home in County Donegal and takes my call only to ask me to phone again later. “You want to talk to me about Krapp’s Last Tape, don’t you?” he says. (Rea is bringing his acclaimed take on Samuel Beckett’s solo masterpiece to the Adelaide Festival next month.) “I’ve had this film crew here all day. Now there’s a sunset coming and they want to shoot me looking at it.”

The film, he says when we eventually connect, is a documentary for Irish television. “About, well, me, actually.” Rea, 78, is a national treasure in Ireland. Last April, at a star-studded ceremony in Dublin, he received the prestigious IFTA (Irish Film and Television Academy) Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented to him by his longtime friend and collaborator, Oscar-winning filmmaker Neil Jordan.

“Stephen brings such an intelligent and intuitive approach to his craft, with authentic depth and honesty and a uniquely Irish stoicism,” said Jordan before welcoming Rea onstage. Rea’s acceptance speech was heartfelt, and unaffected. Dressed in an embossed black velvet suit, his hair as shaggy as it ever was, he thanked Jordan for giving him his first starring role as a murder-avenging saxophonist in 1982’s Angel, and casting him as an IRA kidnapper (Fergus) in 1992’s The Crying Game, a film about political violence and gender set against a backdrop of The Troubles (the violent sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland that went from the late 1960s to 1998), and a part for which he was Oscar-nominated.

“That film changed everything,” he told a crowd that included Cillian Murphy – another longtime Rea collaborator – and Rea’s two adult sons, Danny and Oscar.

It really did, he reiterates now. For himself, and – given that Fergus’s lover, Dil, was sensationally (at the time) revealed as transgender – for the Zeitgeist. Rea sighs as he references the current state of the world. “People should be able to express themselves in whatever way feels right,” he says. “But now Donald Trump says they are going to have to stop that because according to him there are only two genders. It’s all so absolutely dreadful, so freaking awful, this sheer hatred of anyone who is not you.”

Born in Belfast, the working-class son of a bus driver and a housewife – Protestants sympathetic to Irish nationalism – Rea ­received a grant to study English at Queens University then decamped to Dublin to act at the Abbey Theatre. He chose parts written by playwrights whose humanity reflected his own, taking on the wishlist role of Clov in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist one-act play Endgame after the original actor, Jack MacGowran, Beckett’s favourite actor, passed away. He established a long friendship and working relationship with the American playwright and actor Sam Shepard.

With actor Forest Whitaker in The Crying Game.

“I loved Sam, and he loved Beckett. He was so jealous after he went back to America and discovered I was working with him.” In 1980, with playwrights Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, he co-founded Field Day Theatre Company in Derry as a cultural response to the political crisis in Northern Ireland. Its first production was Friel’s Translations (“A masterful exploration of identity, a major concern on our island”); it has since premiered new plays and publishes works of cultural criticism.

But after Jordan “thrust a script and a saxophone into my hands”, Rea’s movie career took off, his rapid ascent dovetailing with a new confidence in Irish cinema. In 1984, he played a vulpine groom in the Jordan-directed Gothic fantasy A Company of Wolves, written by literary icon Angela Carter. “Never trust a man whose eyebrows meet in the middle,” was a catchphrase; we got a final look at Rea’s unibrow after his chopped-off wolf’s head fell into a vat of a milk and bobbed up again as human.

“That was a plaster mould, not my real head,” says Rea, who went on to star in other Jordan films including Interview with a Vampire, Michael Collins and Greta. “The eyebrows were all mine,” he fibs.

Regardless, there is something eminently trustworthy about this versatile actor, whose hangdog good looks have been favoured by A-list film directors from Robert Altman to Mike Leigh, and channelled characters young, middle-aged, old and (in the case of Vampire’s Santiago) hundreds of years old. He is an artist able to run the gamut of emotion in ways bold and/or nuanced, often in the blink of an eye.

As is standard for anyone interviewing Rea, I’ve been instructed not to ask questions about his ex-wife Dolours Price (1950-2013), the mother of his sons, and a former IRA bomber and hunger striker he divorced in 2003 after 20 years of marriage. Knowing this boundary is in place helps keeps his offstage demeanour relaxed; he happily chats about topics ranging from his work as a UNICEF ambassador, visiting Somalia in that capacity in 2023 (“Climate change is real, and we have to do something about it”) to being rated the 13th greatest Irish film actor of all time by the Irish Times in 2020.

Dolours Price, left, and her sister Marian attend a civil rights demonstration in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1972. Picture: AP

“Ah, you know, I think the critics who compiled that list wanted to wish a bit of bad luck on me, making me number 13,” says Rea, who was ranked above the late Cyril Cusack and under Cillian Murphy. Maybe they threw names in the air and picked them at random, I say, and he laughs. “Exactly, exactly.”

So, then, to Krapp’s Last Tape, Beckett’s 1958 one-act masterpiece about mortality, in which a struggling 69-year-old writer listens back to audio recordings made by his 39-year-old self and muses on life and love, on present pain and past happiness. It’s a role previously interpreted by a who’s who of characters actors including Cusack, Michael Gambon, John Hurt and Harold Pinter.

Last year, Rea made his Krapp’s Last Tape debut at the Projects Arts Centre in Dublin, a show intended to celebrate two decades’ worth of distinctive theatre making by Irish company Landmark Productions.

Did he think he was destined to play Krapp? Maybe. Fourteen years ago Rea recorded himself doing the younger Krapp at 39, adopting an affected English accent (“There’s the line where he says ‘I’ve just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for’ because he thought he’d be a very important writer”), then tucked the recordings away. When Landmark’s creative director, Anne Clarke, approached Rea about the show – which reunites him with director Vicky Featherstone, with whom he first worked in 2016 on David Ireland’s award-winning Cyprus Avenue – he dug them out again.

Rea with director Vicky Featherstone. Picture: Ste Murray

“I’d seen some productions of the play where I felt the actor was struggling to sound younger or sound older and I thought I’d relieve myself of that burden. There’s no doubt that my voice is different now.”

He pauses. “And I think I wanted to shrug off the feeling of uselessness I had when I was doing Endgame, at taking over from the great Beckett actor Jack MacGowran. I was too young to be honest,” he says of his 30-year-old self, “but Beckett was present at rehearsals, this uniquely brilliant man with a quiet charisma. At one point I asked him what a certain line meant, and he said, ‘Don’t think about meaning, think about rhythm’. That is a strong key to the music of Beckett’s work.”

Having tried romance, religion and creativity, Krapp tries to soothe himself with words. Rea’s interpretation sees him rolling syllables around his mouth (‘Spool. Spooool’) while wearing scuffed white boots and too-short black trousers, seated at a desk on a minimalist stage with a white-lit walkway. Such touches of Beckettian vaudeville are underscored by his peeling and eating of bananas, clownishly skidding on their peel, tussling between OCD fussiness and mental breakdown.

“The play is about a man who didn’t learn from his mistakes,” Rea says.

So which actor is his all-time favourite Krapp? Cusack? Hurt? Pinter, who played the part from a motorised wheelchair? He changes tack. “You know, as a teenager I would sit in my room and read the plays of Harold Pinter. I worked with Harold; he’s one of the writers I most admire, truly influenced by Beckett. Actually,” says Rea, like the thought has only just occurred to him, “I think the three greatest writers of the mid-20th century are Beckett, Pinter and Shepard.”

We chat about their respective artistic merits, along with their penchant for good times.

“You know, there was this wonderful night after we opened Endgame,” he says animatedly. “We were all in this room at a pub, with Beckett playing piano, then Donald McWhinnie, who had ­directed, also playing piano, and Pinter, who loved a laugh, was there as well. It all became too much for me. There was so much celebrity and achievement around that I had to go home and lie down for a while.”

And now look at you, I say. Life-achievement awards. Documentary crews at sunset.

“Oh,” exclaims Rea, as if this hadn’t actually occurred to him ­either.

Krapp’s Last Tape runs at the Adelaide Festival Centre as part of the Adelaide Festival February 27 to March 8.