Getting ready to act the clone

Scottish actor Brian McCardie revels in provoking strong audience reactions. His current play, about human cloning, looks set to continue that trend, writes Jane Coyle.

Brian McCardie arrives to be interviewed, looking slightly hesitant and apprehensive. His first action is to light up a cigarette, after checking that nobody in the vicinity objects. If he had a "to do" list, giving up smoking would be at the top of it, he says: "But I don't. So it's not."

The manner of his entrance is far removed from his explosive stage presence in his two previous performances in the North. In Gregory Bourke's Gagarin Way, McCardie played a violent, left-wing factory worker from the east coast of Scotland; in Neil LBute's The Mercy Seat, he was a Manhattan sales executive, carrying on an illicit affair while the Twin Towers crumbled.

When his attention is drawn to the parallels between the cold-hearted blood-letting in the final scenes of Gagarin Way and recent sickening events in Iraq, he blanches slightly.

"I must admit, I hadn't thought about that - until now. But, God yes, it's true. I guess that's the mark of a great play, when it can hit home with such force. Even at the time, I found it difficult to play that guy, because he was so nihilistic, yet so intelligent and well read. He always sat on the sidelines, never failing at anything because he never tried to do anything.

"That terrible final action was the first brave thing he had ever done in his life, but it was an act of mindless brutality . . . " His voice tails off and he lights up another cigarette. When told that at the end of the opening night, one of the audience was heard railing loudly against "that wee scumbag", his mood lifts: "Great!"

And the news that a woman was overheard leaving the theatre after The Mercy Seat, muttering "what a total bastard", turns the shy smile into a delighted grin: "Even better!"

McCardie is an actor whose style is designed to make an impact - unpredictable, dangerous and with more than a touch of swagger. He loves it when a performance can provoke that strength of reaction - positive or negative.

"Every time on stage is different for me and, I hope, for the audience," he says. "My own performance is dependent on the way the show is going on the night. It's like the way you rehearse an argument in your head, but it never works out like that.

"You have your pointers, as Billy Connolly calls them, but beyond that you can't plan for anything. If you could, you might as well just video the show and play it night after night. I can't do that. I have to be going from moment to moment or I would get completely lost. You have to live through that hour and a half you're on stage or you're just kidding yourself and your audience."

Shortly, McCardie will "live through" the tangled, intersecting relationships of no less than three characters, as he takes on the demanding roles of the three cloned sons in Caryl Churchill's award-winning play, A Number. This will be the third time he has been cast by Prime Cut Productions director Jackie Doyle, and he reckons the challenge she throws him is getting bigger each time.

"This is a brilliant play but a very difficult one. There is so much that is unsaid. The writer is very brave and economical with language, so at the moment I'm trying to figure out what's left out - a bit like the grace notes in music. You have to make sense of what's not said, so as to make sense of what is said. It's written in quite a stylised way, which makes it very difficult to map your way through."

Churchill's play about a father and his cloned sons is emotionally gruelling, and raises extremely testing issues that cry out to be confronted. McCardie is plainly moved and intellectually troubled by the moral maze, personified by his trio of identical characters.

"The whole cloning thing is such a huge moral minefield," he says. "If someone's husband or wife or child dies, is it moral to have a copy of them made?

"In this play, an alcoholic man loses his wife and, through his own inadequacies, he begins to neglect and abuse his only son. The boy ends up so damaged that the father decides to stop the cycle by putting him into care. But before he does so, he calculatedly takes DNA samples to make a clone, so that he can wipe the slate clean, give up the drink and start again with a new son. He literally replaces one son with another and even gives him the same name. It all seems to be working well until a third clone unexpectedly appears . . . Then it all starts to unravel.

"There is no real moral guide to the cloning issue, except the present state of our society, which says: 'No, it's not right'. But the play's hypothesis asks: 'What if someone went ahead and did it?' The repercussions are hideous. The process is completely dehumanising and therefore repugnant.

"There's a line which refers to 'the same basic raw material'. It's as though human life is just a commodity. We are in a world where, sure as hell, someone is going to clone a human being - maybe someone already has. Once it's done, you can't unmake that decision."

Where McCardie is now in his career is a far cry from the early beginnings when, at the age of 16, he joined an amateur drama group in his home town of Carluke, 25 miles south of Glasgow. But, more relaxed into the chat now, his recollection reveals just a touch of the boyish devilment that is so much an element of his stage persona.

"We lived in the middle of nowhere, in the country. There wasn't a whole heap to do. Much against my will, I joined a local drama group, which my girlfriend at the time belonged to. My motives were anything but artistic - I reckoned there was a decent chance of losing my virginity without spending too much on bus fares!

"Straight away, I was cast in the lead role in Godspell. I don't know what it says about me that I started out as Jesus and ended up playing psychos. But from the start, I loved it. It wasn't all that stuff about standing up and having people look at me. I found that part terrifying - and still do. But it was like picking up a saxophone and finding you could busk, without practising. It's an aptitude - something you realise you can just do."

But when it came to a career, McCardie Senior had other ideas.

"I went to study law at Glasgow University, because my dad wanted me to. I hated it. To succeed as a lawyer, you have to have a forensic brain and a desire for a BMW. It really is not for someone with a mind that wanders off at tangents. My dad was gutted when I threw it in and went off to drama college in London, but my philosophy is that you should study what you are good at and work hard to get better at it."

After graduating, a fallow period followed. "It was like being kicked out of the family home - 'so, you're an actor, big deal, but you're on your own'. I got a job as the merchandising manager at Les Misérables, the best paid job I ever had, then I was offered a part in a pantomime chorus, when another actor injured himself. I was cast as an undercover cop in the ill-fated Phil Redmond series Waterfront Beat, and went on to do a few more things on stage and television. My big break came when I was cast in Rob Roy, alongside Liam Neeson - that certainly opened some doors for me."

For the past few years, McCardie has been based in Glasgow, where the work has flowed to his door. But, jaded with what he describes as "the sniping and bitterness within the acting community in Glasgow, as in all provincial towns", he is in the process of moving back to London.

"There is a rampant pessimism amongst actors in Glasgow and a sense of everyone looking over everyone else's shoulder in a judgmental kind of way. It's a bad story and I don't want to be around it. Like New York or LA, London may be anonymous, but it has a wider variety of good quality work to offer and you can be yourself and have a bit of privacy, which I like."

As A Number prepares to open in Dublin, before transferring to Prime Cut's home territory of Belfast, McCardie is relishing the prospect of a family reunion when it plays at An Grianán in Letterkenny, Co Donegal.

"My family, on both my mother and father's side, is from Donegal - that's the heartland. So there might be a chance for a few of us to get together in a few weeks' time.

"In spite of my having let the side down by dropping out of law, my parents are incredibly supportive. God love them, they've had to be. There are five of us and only one of my sisters has a proper job - as head of languages at a high school. The other four are all writers or actors. A terrible disappointment altogether!"

The time up, the ice broken, McCardie stubs out his cigarette, gathers up his belongings and heads back to the rehearsal room, to resume the challenge of becoming the three in one.

A Number is showing at the Project, Dublin from today until Saturday. The play is then showing as part of the Belfast Fesival at Queen's, from October 24th to the 27th. It will then tour in Galway, Letterkenny, Coleraine, Derry, Lisburn and Downpatrick.

A discussion on ethics will take place after the Dublin show on Thursday, October 21st, with members of the Council for Bioethics.