The 'eerie afterlife' of Donal McCann

CULTURE SHOCK:The great Donal McCann subsumed his roles into a vast, private, unreachable darkness. Now, 10 years after his death, it finally feels as if he is letting go, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

ON THE COVER of the printed edition of Sebastian Barry's luminous play The Steward of Christendom, there is a photograph of Donal McCann in his last great role, the Lear-like Thomas Dunne. McCann is being measured for his regulation suit as an inmate of a mental hospital.

His arms are above his head and there is a tape measure around his chest. But it is his face that demands the viewer’s attention – or more precisely the eyes. Framed above by the arched eyebrows of an utterly bewildered man, and below by bags that seem more like scars, they hold an infinity of desolation. Even if you never saw the play or heard McCann’s hypnotically resonant voice – a sound that seemed to carry its own ghostly echo in the undertone – you know exactly the emotions he is communicating. In the mere monochrome dumbshow of a photo there is still an expressive power beyond anything else I’ve experienced in the theatre.

This was the year of the 10th anniversary of McCann’s appallingly early death and yet it is more than just the middle-aged habit of always thinking things happened more recently than they did that makes this distance seem improbable. McCann does not quite seem to be dead.

This is partly due to the happy fact that some stunning performances live on in film. There's a tendency to think of McCann, in relation to cinema, as the lost member of the hard-drinking Irish trio that included Peter O'Toole and Richard Harris. In fact, his avoidance of stardom means that we have a legacy of superb performances in "small" Irish films – Bob Quinn's Poitín, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's December Bride, Pat O'Connor's Cal, Neil Jordan's The Miracle. And there is his utterly perfect Gabriel Conroy – so kind, so melancholy, so completely lost – in John Huston's flawless The Dead.

Yet that performance in Huston’s late masterpiece (to be screened again by RTÉ over the Christmas) points to the other way in which McCann does not seem to be gone so long. The sheer potency of his Gabriel means that he haunts, not just the film but, retrospectively, Joyce’s story itself. It is very hard now to read the story – and particularly its famous final passages – without hearing McCann’s voice and picturing him standing at that window with the snow falling. Like an uneasy spirit hovering between this world and the next, McCann has the eerie afterlife of a spirit that has seeped into the texts he inhabited.

The stage roles that truly possessed him still seem to be possessed by him.

Three in particular came to belong to him. His extraordinary double act with John Kavanagh as Boyle and Joxer in Joe Dowling's Gate production of Juno and the Paycockdefined those roles for at least a generation. His heartbreaking embodiment of Thomas Dunne's sorrow, and the vividness with which that performance is burned into the minds of those who saw it, make it seem impossible that he did it almost 15 years ago. Those factors, though, also make it incredibly difficult for another actor to be Thomas Dunne — the reason, surely, that Barry's wonderful play has been out of bounds ever since.

And, of course, there is Faith Healer. McCann's defining moment as Frank Hardy is, along with Siobhán McKenna's Mommo in Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, the most searing performance witnessed by Irish theatregoers of my generation. Very few actors have ever inhabited a stage in the way he did in that role, seeming to fill the entire expanse of the Abbey by himself. No other actor I've seen could make the auditorium feel cold as he walked out towards the audience, taking us physically into the presence of some ineffable, restless mystery that hovered between wonder and terror.

McCann’s complete mastery of these roles was such that you forgot that he was, at a rational level, “wrong” for them. He was far too young and urban, and far too powerful, for Hardy. He was 51 when he played Thomas Dunne, who is in his mid-70s, and made no effort to act the character’s age. If you thought about it, this made a mess of the play’s chronology. But you didn’t think about it because you had far better things to do, like being enraptured and entranced and devastated and renewed. These details didn’t matter in the workings of genius, but they do draw attention to the degree to which McCann fused the roles with himself.

He subsumed them into a vast, private, unreachable darkness. At his most potent, McCann didn’t perform roles. He used them to define the outlines of an emptiness that was otherwise filled with anguish and anger.

Through a Frank Hardy or a Thomas Dunne, he could limit and control, if never fully illuminate, a personal torment. And as a member of the audience you knew he was doing this, not through gossip or extraneous information, but because every aspect of his presence, every beautifully articulated word, every intelligent and truthful gesture, was surrounded by an aura of unseen sorrow. You knew you were gaining something precious from another man’s pain, and this forced you to pay the most acute attention.

It is fitting now that Faith Healer, at least, is being released from McCann's ferocious grip. That process started with Ralph Fiennes's cool, detached, almost blank Frank Hardy in 2006. It has been completed in different ways by Joe Dowling (who directed McCann in the role and played a crucial role in his subsequent career) in Minneapolis and Owen Roe at the Gate. It feels as if, after a decade, McCann is letting go. In that gesture of release, an unquiet soul may find some peace.