BRAT PACK SURVIVOR

As Galway takes centre stage, Andrew McCarthy prepares for the Arts Festival by telling Sean O'Driscoll how he's gone from brat pack heart-throb to treading the boards as Tennessee Williams. While Michael Dwyer previews the 17th Film Fleadh

Andrew McCarthy is sitting in a Starbucks coffee shop in Greenwich Village and he doesn't like it. He has lived in the West Village for the last 20 years, since he was a Brat Pack idol making movies for adoring teenagers. Now he's watching the area being slowly taken over by chain stores and the Starbucks phenomenon. "I'm not a Starbucks fan," he says, "but if nowhere else is open, well, alright."

If you could project the Andrew McCarthy of Pretty in Pink forward 20 years, he would look like he does now. He is sensitive and smiles a lot, he has long wavy brown hair, and he has held on to the boyish good looks that made him an adolescence teenage pin-up in the 1980s.

He's often recognised when he walks around nearby streets or when he collects his son from kindergarten. I can see a middle-aged man at another table pointing towards us and talking excitedly to a female friend.

I wonder if it's wearying to deal with the fame some 20 years after the Brat Pack films were released? "Oh, I'm fine with it. It's not like they hated my work and they're coming to me full of venom. They've projected something on to me that they have found in themselves and that projection is lovely."

So what does he think of those films after all this time? "Well, I've been asked about it so many times over the years, but now I have a new theory. I think the films captured so much because they were the first to treat teenagers with respect, in that their problems were real, however glossy. They were treated as real people, not just underground junior people. I hear about that from people who were teenagers in the early '80s."

The Brat Pack title was something invented by a journalist and not anything with relevance to his life, he adds. "I lived a separate life here in New York. It's not like the original Rat Pack. We weren't down in Vegas drinking shots together."

He likes the enthusiasm of the 1980s movies fans, but his mind is on his current projects. McCarthy is flying to Ireland this month for the Galway Arts Festival, where he will perform A Distant Country Called Youth, a one-man show based on the letters of Tennessee Williams. It will be only the third time he will perform the 80-minute piece, which a friend wrote after reading a new collection of Williams's letters.

The subject is the playright's life from his childhood to his first success with The Glass Menagerie and the start of his work on A Streetcar Named Desire.

"You see whole other side of Tennessee Williams. He worked in a shoebox factory and all kinds of things and here he was, this crazy poet that nobody had ever heard of."

I tell him of an Irish review of the Williams letters which said they showed such an unbridled egotist that it's difficult to enjoy his work after reading them.

"I don't see that," says McCarthy. "I think he was an artist with great guilt about his sister Rose when she was locked up. He carried that all his life. His mother sounded like a tough character, his father was absent. I don't know if he was any worse than any young man in his 20s."

The real tragedy, he says, is the loss of talent brought on by Williams's rampant alcoholism.

"When I first read the work, I remember saying "Ok, well, where is the story?" Then I read it again and realised it was going somewhere. It reminds me of this article he wrote about the disaster of success and how you end up thinking: 'This is all happening but how come I'm still me?'"

I wonder if this disappointment with fame is something McCarthy has experienced in his own career? "Oh, of course. I first saw my name on a billboard in Times Square 20 years ago. I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. I looked at it and said: 'OK. It's there. Well, I'm hungry. Time to eat'."

He is astounded by the reality TV phenomenon and people's desperate desire to be seen on television. "What's more interesting is why the audience are so insatiable for it. I'm not sure what it touches in us except that we like to see people suffer. It gives people a fleeting, false sense of superiority. I get it too, when I watch these things. I'm looking at the TV going 'you fucking idiot. Come on, you're fired!'"

He laughs loudly and sips again from his ice tea. He'd rather talk about his trips to Ireland than reality TV. He has been coming to Ireland for 20 years, to play golf in Clare, where his family is originally from.

His interest in Ireland led him on a two-decade crusade to film a Frank O'Connor short story called News for the Church, which follows a young woman as she goes to confess her sexual exploits to a cynical priest.

The film earned strong reviews at the Craic Irish Short Film Festival in New York last year. McCarthy went low budget, shooting the interiors in Vancouver while making the TV series Kingdom Hospital. He shot the exteriors after trawling on the internet for a suitable Irish church, eventually settling on one in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow. For the lead, he recruited Nora-Jane Noone, known for her role in The Magdalene Sisters.

"The director of photography on Kingdom Hospital said that he would do the camerawork later that week. I rang up and asked would you mind flying out Good Friday to shoot on Easter Saturday. Like a good Catholic, she was on the plane."

He was conscious of keeping the film away from stage-Irish cheesiness. "I didn't want to compete with Frank O'Connor's dialogue. You know, the American writer coming in with the wee Irish dialogue. You know what I mean!" He laughs again.

He would like to direct more, and finds that it helps him learn more about acting. He remembers his family's reaction when he first said he wanted to attend New York University acting school. "'No fucking son of mine is ever going to be a thespian!" decreed his father, a tax shelter consultant.

So if not for the money, why has McCarthy stayed in acting for so long when he could easily have moved on to another career, basking in the big hair, bright-jacketed days of his early '80s glory. "Because I just love it," he says. "Some people are into things because they want to make huge money. I'm ambitious, but it's to do good work and I'm just aiming in a different direction right now."

ART FOR EVERYONE

Galway. The placename synonymous with festivals. Galway's festival has always been about trying to expand the boundaries, and coax new audiences by bringing the arts to less intimidating venues: fields, streets, shop windows.

Among the highlights this year are the world premiere of Mother Courage & her children in Purgatory, a collaboration between Chile's Teatro del Silencio and Spain's Karlik Danza Teatro. This piece of physical theatre, using dance, mime, acrobatics and music, is based in Brecht's play and takes place outdoors in the Fisheries Field.

Druid will be performing the Synge cycle of plays, directed by Garry Hynes. On certain days, all six plays will be performed in one day; an extraordinary marathon both for audience and performers.

Enda Walsh's play, The Small Things, gets its Irish premiere, as does the much-awaited French production of Aurélia's Oratorio, a combination of circus and music hall (see cover photograph). The latter was created by Victoria Thiérrée Chaplin with Aurélia Thiérrée, mother and sister of James Thiérrée, whose Junebug Symphony was the undisputed festival hit a couple of years back.

The big dance event this year is Phoenix Dance Theatre from Britain, which is bringing a triple bill by choreographers Rui Horta, Henri Oguike and Darshan Singh Bhuller. In literature, critic John Carey will debate the topic of his latest book, "What good are the arts?" with a panel of arts critics and artists.

In music, there's a capella Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo, Marianne Faithfull, Mavis Staples, June Tabor, Toasted Herectic, The Proclaimers, Michelle Shocked and Damien Dempsey. Visual art includes shows by British photographer Richard Billingham, and Maltese cartoonist Joe Sacco.

And if Galway won't be strange and wonderful enough with all that, the theme of Macnas' parade in the middle Sunday this year is Áit Ait - Strange Place.

Rosita Boland

ALL THE FUN OF THE FLEADH

WITH six new Irish feature films and a diverse range of international cinema, along with a strong guest list headed by key figures in US independent film, the 17th Galway Film Fleadh, which runs from July 5th-10th, may well prove to be the event's most stimulating edition to date.

It opens on Tuesday night with Gaby Dellal's Scottish film, On a Clear Day, featuring Peter Mullan as a Glasgow shipyard worker who is made redundant and pursues his dream of swimming the English Channel. The closing film on Sunday week is Anthony Byrne's tale of culinary seduction and fantasy, Short Order, starring John Hurt, Vanessa Redgrave and Jack Dee.

Short Order is one of five Irish features having their world premieres at the fleadh, along with photographer Perry Ogden's debut, Pavee Lackeen, set in the traveller community; Stephen Bradley's Boy Eats Girl, a comic horror movie of zombies rampaging through the Dublin suburbs; Stephen Kane's Starfish, following three misfits on a road trip to Cork; and Patrick Kenny's contemporary thriller, Winter's End.

Fresh from winning prizes at two US festivals, Dermot Doyle's no-budget feature, Hill 16, a Dublin coming-of-age story involving a teenager's obsession with his teacher, is also showing at Galway, along with Terry Loane's Mickybo & Me and Pearse Elliott's The Mighty Celt. The latter was shot by accomplished lighting cameraman Seamus Deasy, the subject of a special tribute programme.

The international guests will include Paul Schrader, the gifted director of Mishima, American Gigolo, Blue Collar and Affliction. Schrader will give the screenwriting masterclass on Wednesday afternoon, after the screening of a new print of Taxi Driver, which he scripted before he started to direct his own movies.

Patricia Clarkson and Campbell Scott will make a formidable double act as presenters of the acting masterclass on July 9th, and the fleadh will screen several of their films, including their latest, The Dying Gaul, which features both actors with Peter Sarsgaard in an emotional triangle. In a special event on the same day, Matt Dillon will introduce his Cambodian-set drama, City of Ghosts, which he directed and in which he stars, and he will participate in a public interview afterwards.

The very busy schedule on July 9th will also feature the directing masterclass given by Luis Mandoki, the Mexican-born director of White Palace, When a Man Loves a Woman and the recent Innocent Voices, which is set in mid-1980s El Salvador.

A season of Russian cinema will include a selection of new films as well as seven directed by Alexander Sokurov, including his latest drama, The Sun, dealing with the Japanese emperor Hirohito. A strand of new French cinema, which notably includes À Tout de Suite, Innocence and Le Grand Voyage, will be shown alongside a strand devoted to French classics, among them The 400 Blows, Pickpocket, Playtime and L'Atalante.

New international cinema at Galway will include Walter Salles's remake of the Japanese horror-thriller Dark Water; Thomas Vinterberg's Dear Wendy, starring Jamie Bell and scripted by Lars von Trier; and Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, in which two young Palestinians are recruited as suicide bombers. In addition, the fleadh offers a wealth of new short films, animation and documentaries - and the always-packed late-night festival club.

Advance booking is now open (www.galwayfilmfleadh.com)