Taking a bizarre twist

From stand-up to acting to film-making - Mark Doherty has taken a long winding road to his latest dark venture 'A Film with Me in It' which also features his brother David O'Doherty and Dylan Moran writes Donald Clarke

'MAKE ME SOUND INTELLIGENT," Mark Doherty quips as I make my way down the stairs. Well, that's not too much of a challenge. Doherty, long of face, amiable of personality, has, over the last decade or so, been evolving into one of our smartest polymaths. First achieving fame as a stand-up comic, he went on to secure acting roles in films such as Breakfast on Plutoand TV shows such as The Clinic. Later, he wrote a brilliant play, Trad- a critical success on several continents - and now he has written a film called, accurately enough, A Film with Me in It.

So, you wouldn't call Mark stupid. You might describe him as a bit of a rambler - or creatively discursive, to be kind - but his intelligence shows through in all his work. A Film with Me in Itis a very Dohertyesque entity. Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon, co-creator of the television series Paths to Freedom, the picture focuses on the three impoverished inhabitants of a grimy flat in some middle-class quarter of Dublin. Doherty plays an unsuccessful actor. Mark's brother David O'Doherty (the award-winning comic added the "O" when he embarked on his own career) turns up as the character's own paralysed sibling. Dylan Moran, amusingly vague as ever, plays the least focused occupant of the building.

Beginning with a naturalistic tone, the film gradually turns darker and darker until, as bodies line the walls, it arrives in territory previously marked out by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett.

"It's funny, but it started out as a more of a sketch," Mark explains.

"It was perhaps based on real life and it was set in a voice-over studio. Most of my work takes an ordinary situation and brings it somewhere bizarre. I didn't sit down and say: 'I am going to write a dark comedy.' But by the sixth draft it had somehow turned into that." He hacked away at it like a sculptor and eventually this odd shape emerged from the clay? "Yes. It is organic. That is the same with everything I write, I think.

"It's funny. I have produced a few bits of work over the past few years and people have thrown the word 'Beckett' at me. So I guess there must be something there. It certainly never was a conscious influence."

It comes as no surprise to discover that the roles were written with Mark, David and Dylan in mind. There must, however, have been some pressure from financiers to shoehorn a few movie stars into the production. I wonder if Mark had to demand that the cast remained as he originally envisioned it. Was there ever a chance that, say, Liam Neeson could have been squatting in the basement with, say, Colin Farrell?

"Of course the producers had some ideas of their own," Mark says slightly cryptically. "But I understand that. I don't have the profile of many good actors that could have played the part. It would have been easier to sell it if Cillian Murphy was in it, so I understand they might have been a little reluctant to give me the part."

At any rate, it is now hard to imagine the film featuring anybody other than the current actors. Each of the three principals has just the right class of squashed despair for such a grimly comic scenario. Away from the decaying flat, Neil Jordan, the notably eccentric film director, plays a notably eccentric film director who auditions Mark's character for a part. Jordan really is playing himself. Isn't he? Doherty shuffles in his seat and emits a few huffs and a few puffs.

"Well. Neil has a unique energy," he says. "I suppose the character is an amalgam of several people I have worked with in the audition process.

"I WROTE THE scene and showed it to Ian and he immediately suggested Neil and I thought, brilliant. Whether he knows it is partly based on him I couldn't say. If he does know then he was a good sport to take it on." I dare say Mark knows how to deal with eccentric bohemians. He is the son of the brilliant jazz pianist Jim Doherty, who also worked on The Late Late Showand - hold on to your hats - wrote music for such shows as Wanderly Wagon.I imagine that the family home was habitually full of talking dogs wearing berets and hipsters puffing jazz Woodbines.

"Ah no. It was not quite like that," Mark laughs. "Though there were a lot of musicians hanging around. It was a very typical middle-class upbringing, though I guess I was aware that my friends' parents tended to have nine-to-five jobs that allowed them to go to parent teacher meetings. I didn't see it as a bohemian upbringing at the time, but when I drifted towards comedy rather than, say, accountancy it was less of a shock to them."

Mark pottered off to Trinity College Dublin after school, but he didn't really take to the academic life and dropped out after two years. He spent some time living in Paris. He worked in Adam's auctioneers on St Stephen's Green. Eventually acknowledging the greasepaint in his veins, he grabbed a guitar and began busking on the streets of the capital. One evening he met a pal in the Stag's Head pub who suggested Mark might like to audition for a play. He enjoyed the experience and embarked on an acting course.

So where does the stand-up comedy come in? "Everything happened by accident," he says. "I met an old school friend who was running a comedy club in the mid-1990s. He knew I was acting and suggested he might put me down for a gig. That went well and then I did another and another."

Doherty quickly established a formidable reputation during those boom years for comedy. His gentle, moseying style seemed quite unique and pundits expected him to remain a stalwart of the scene for decades to come. Yet he now claims to have totally given up stand-up. I assume that the pressure of facing a potentially hostile audience each night proved too much for him.

"There were a few deaths on stage here and there," he says. "But I would like to debunk on record the myth that it is the scariest job in the world. To anybody who doesn't work in the field it's a very scary prospect. But the more you do it, the better you get at it. You build up some safety nets. The deaths become fewer and fewer."

So why did he quit? "As I said, there was never a plan with my career. By the year 2000 comedy had taken over my life. I remember being offered a few good acting gigs and having to turn them down because I was doing this small gig in Newcastle or wherever. I remember standing in a train station in Brighton after a gig hadn't gone that well and thinking I'd had to turn down a part in a film. I didn't love it enough. Plus there were a few writing ideas I had."

ONE OF THOSE ideas developed into the highly acclaimed play Trad. A bleak comedy detailing the relationship between an elderly grotesque and his even more decrepit father, the piece premiered at the Galway Arts Festival in 2004, before moving on to Dublin, Adelaide, London and the Edinburgh Festival, where it won a Fringe First Award. Other prestigious gongs followed.

"The first night was a great relief," he remembers. "We worked very hard and it was great to hear the laughs coming. While writing it I had no idea it would go anywhere past the Galway Arts Festival. Then it just started gaining momentum. We never thought it would play outside Ireland. But that relationship in the play seems to be universal."

Do audiences react differently in different countries? "Not really. Though I remember seeing a production in Canada and being concerned that they weren't laughing, but at the end they all seemed to have loved it. I guess Irish audiences like to laugh at the bleakness."

I guess they do. A Film with Me in Itplunges once again into those gloomy pools, but still manages to rustle up the laughs. Is this a uniquely Irish form of humour? Mark, who isn't so sure, begins to muse on the nature of comedy and, after several interesting verbal detours, shuffles to a stop.

"God. That was very winding. Wasn't it?" he says of his monologue.

Yes, I guess so. But smart. It takes no great effort to make Mark Doherty seem intelligent.

A Film with Me in Itopens on Friday