From one stage to another

Tom Conti explains why he's the happiest dad in the world this week, and why he is not so interested in the stage - apart from appearing in 'One Helluva Life' at the Dublin Theatre Festival.

On a list of things you don't expect Tom Conti to say - he of the brown eyes, dark-chocolate-with-a-hint-of-Scotland voice, and lopsided grin - "I'm the happiest dad in the world this week" must rank pretty high.

Nor do you expect an actor who has achieved both critical acclaim in the theatre and "him off the telly" recognition in the street to utter the words "I'm not really very interested in the stage" - especially since he has come to town to launch the programme for this year's Dublin Theatre Festival. The dad bit is down to his daughter, Nina, a ventriloquist of the alternative kind who has been taking the Edinburgh Fringe by storm and winning awards all over the place.

But really, Mr Conti, not interested in the stage? What are you interested in, then? He flashes the famous grin. "I like movies," he offers. "I don't go to the theatre very much. There's a handful of actors that I would go and see - Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith - chums I go to see, really. But I don't go to the theatre. Well, a lot of the time it's quite boring. I mean, you go to the National, or the Royal Shakespeare Company, and you sit there, you know, and they could take your appendix out, you're so deeply catatonic. Do you agree or not? Well, there you go."

Needless to say, Conti is deeply interested in the show he will bring to the Tivoi Theatre in late September for the Dublin Theatre Festival, followed by a run at the Everyman in Cork.

Set in 1942 on the stage of a rundown theatre in New York, William Luce's One Helluva Life focuses on actor John Barrymore as he struggles, through a haze of booze and memories, to recreate his trademark performance as Richard III. Rupert Farley plays the stage manager who is hired to prompt Barrymore but ends up heckling him, and Bryan Forbes - whose wife, Nanette Newman, suggested the role to Conti in the first place - directs.

"We were going to do the normal tour in England and into the West End in the spring; and then a couple of the tour dates fell out and someone said: 'Have you thought of going to Ireland with this?'. So here we are."

At 61, Conti exudes what might be called boyish charm if it weren't so obviously tempered by a) a keen intelligence, and b) a very grown-up disregard for what other people think. This last probably reflects a strong streak of Scottish pragmatism in his make-up - but, in that case, what's to be said about the smattering of Irish (on his mother's side) and Italian (on his father's) blood?

"Ah, well now," he says, putting on a serious face, "when I'm here I'm going to try and do a bit of research, because my grandmother was a Donaghy who was from . . . somewhere. I'm not very sure where. Where is Sligo? That name comes to mind. It will be interesting to see if I can trace anything back."

So he has already researched the Italian side then, has he? "No, no, no - not at all," he says, chuckling. "I couldn't go and spend the time in Italy necessary to get through the red tape to do a search. Can you imagine? It would be a nightmare. So I don't know a great deal about my ancestry. It's fairly peasanty on both sides, though."

For a peasant from near Paisley, the mill town in Scotland which was, by the time he grew up there, "dying in spades", Conti had a childhood steeped in the performing arts. At the age of four, he began to take piano lessons - and progressed so quickly that he was regarded as something of a prodigy. "My parents were great theatre lovers and music lovers," he explains. "The opera and the concert hall were part of my upbringing, so I was very lucky in that respect. All these things were handed to me - and some of it obviously stuck to my hand. It's really as simple as that. I thought I would be a musician, but I turned out to be an actor. Weird."

Does he regret not having followed the musical road? "In many ways, I do," he says. "Well, I can't regret it, you know? Because my life has been good - and it might have been very, very bad had I been a musician. I might have been a very, very bad musician."

Instead, with the help of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, he became a very, very good actor.

He received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a drunken poet in the 1983 film, Reuben Reuben, and the adoration of a generation of fans for his part in the televised version of Frederick Raphael's varsity novel, Glittering Prizes, way back in 1976. He has played every conceivable role on stage, screen and television, from a quadriplegic in the play Whose Life Is It Anyway? through Rupert Murdoch for a US network to Rachel's father in Friends. Most recently, he has done a series of voiceovers for the BBC television children's programme, Andy Pandy.

Ask Conti which of his finished works have most pleased him and, after a bit of grumbling, he comes up with two movies, both of which the wider world would regard as failures. One is Robert Altman's film of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, which he did with John Travolta - "It's so funny, the characters are so strange, but it didn't do any business because it's just not the kind of thing that people go to the pictures to see" - and the other is called Saving Grace. "It's about a Pope who goes AWOL and it was really a very good story, and quite a harsh story, but they wanted to turn it soft - the studio, not the director and producer that I worked with," he says. "They wanted a frivolous picture and we brought back a hard one, and it wasn't what they wanted."

ASK anybody else about Conti's career, of course, and they'll say just two words: "Shirley Valentine." His performance as the oily Greek taverna owner who persuades Pauline Collins to forsake egg, chips and a Scouse husband in favour of a lifetime of feta and frolicking in the surf was so convincing that, for many people, Conti is forever Costas.

Does he ever feel like drowning this Latin lover alter ego? "Heavens, no," he says, sounding genuinely shocked. "There are actors who go through a whole career and never have anything at all which was memorable to the public - so I'm lucky to have had more than one in my time. And I'm grateful to have had any of them. Why brush them under the carpet? They're why you joined, after all."

So can he defend the dreadful Costas? Yes, he can.

"He was an interesting guy. I liked him; I was sorry for him. It's a lonely life, I think, waking up every two weeks with a different woman in your bed - and that's what his life was."

For a corny romantic feelgood film, Shirley Valentine touched a surprisingly serious chord in the zeitgeist of the early 1990s. Its feisty heroine wasn't, apparently, the only wife who felt she was talking to the wall or trapped between four of them.

"I remember one particularly, an Irish woman, who came up to me in London and said: 'Mr Conti, I've done it, I've done it, I've done a Shirley.' She said: 'I told them all to bugger off.' She'd left the husband, kids, everything.

"I said: 'How long have you been away?' It was eight weeks."

He pauses, remembering. "I'd love to know whether she went back. It's probably something that in the stillness of the night she started to regret. I mean, one doesn't want to feel responsible for anything like that, but . . .

"Actually, it's Willy Russell's problem, not mine. He wrote it. If you do a Shirley and get in trouble, call Willy Russell."

Long before Costas, of course, there was the role in Glittering Prizes, which had earned Conti another unenviable tag, "thinking woman's crumpet". He chortles.

"Yeah, that was the first, wasn't it? The sex symbol thing. I don't know what to say to that, really. If you started to think about that, you'd go in the loony bin. I mean, what is a symbol of sex? You don't wake up in the morning and go, 'Well, I wonder what the sex symbol will do today?'

"It's so ridiculous, isn't it? It's nothing to do with oneself at all."

The brown eyes glint wickedly. Not half, it isn't.

One Helluva Life runs at the Tivoli Theatre, Dublin, from Monday, September 30th until Saturday,October 5th, then moves to the Everyman Palace, Cork.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DUBLIN THEATRE FESTIVAL

The Mysteries
South Africa's Broomfield Opera's show features music based on traditional African folk songs, a lingually diverse script, a cast of 45 drawn from the townships and the ambitious aim of depicting the history of the world. Created by Mark Dornford-May, it has played all over the world since 2000, including a West End run.
Gaiety Theatre, Oct 1st-5th

Glengarry Glen Ross
The renowned Chicago company Steppenwolf takes on David Mamet's timeless tale of American corporate culture in the first major US revivial of the play since its première, and the only performances outside Chicago.
Olympia Theatre, Oct 2nd-6th

Tokyo Notes
Oriza Hirata is known in Japan for pioneering "quiet theatre": the name given by critics to his naturalistic and analytical work, which Hirata describes as "precisely and exquisitely" presenting the state of people's minds. Tokyo's Seinendan Theatre Company performs in Japanese with English surtitles.
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Sept 30th-Oct 2nd

Jimmy
Canadian Marie Brassard, a frequent collaborator with Robert Lepage over the past decade, wrote and performs this monologue by a character of pure fiction, half-man, half-woman, who is composed of parts of several people, including the consciousness of an actress - Brassard herself. Presented by Infrarouge Theatre of Quebec.
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Oct 8th-12th

Ariel
A new play by Marina Carr, directed by Conall Morrison, exploring power and corruption in contemporary Irish society and loosely based on Iphigenia. It's a tale about a Midlands TD, willing to literally sacrifice everything, even his family, to further his political career.
Abbey Theatre, runs from Sept 30th

See You Next Tuesday
Ardal O'Hanlon (in his first stage role) and Risteard Cooper star in Ronald Harwood's English-language adaptation of the hugely successful 1993 French farce, Le Diner de Cons (a film version was one of the highest grossing films in France). The plot - every Tuesday, Pierre has dinner with a different companion, always a twat . . . and O'Hanlon plays the dining companion. Adapted by Ronald Harwood.
Gate Theatre, Oct 1st-14th

Done Up Like A Kipper
Comic drama from Ken Harmon, in an Abbey Theatre commission, which tracks the life of a Dublin taxi-driver, Gino, and his family.
Peacock Theatre, Oct 9th-12th

Closing Time
London's National Theatre's production of Owen McCafferty's (Shoot the Crow, Mojo Mickeybo) play about life in Belfast, post-Belfast Agreement, looking at those people whose lives have not moved on, despite the huge politcal changes around them. The cast includes Jim Norton and Lalor Roddy.
Tivoli theatre, Oct 8th-12th

The Notebook/The Proof
A major hit at last year's Edinburgh Festival, these two plays from Antwerp's De Onderneming company can be seen separately or as a pair. They tell the story of twin boys sent as refugees during the war to live with their difficult grandmother. As escape from their dismal family life and the war around them, they write in their Big Notebook the story of their days, embellishing more and more as they continue. Where does truth begin or end, these plays ask.
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Oct 4th-6th

Also watch out for:
What Ever (Bewleys Festival Centre, Liberty Hall), Heather Woodbury's one-woman "American Odyssey", a story told over four consecutive nights, which was a wow of the Galway Arts Festival in July. Blowfish (The Ark) a children's show from the Ark and Barabbas. Donal O'Kelly's The Hand, a Dublin Theatre Festival production, fusing language and music into what he calls "gig theatre". Druid's production of John B. Keane's Sive, with Eamonn Morrissey, Derbhle Crotty and Peter Halpin.
The 45th Dublin Theatre Festival, September 29th - October 12th.
www.dublintheatrefestival.com
The box office opens from Monday at Bewleys Festival Centre, Liberty Hall. Tel: 01 817 33 33