THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: NIALL TOIBIN: Actor, comedian, civil servant, octogenarian: Niall Toibin's many characters are filled with the drive and spirit that were instilled at home and refined by life, writes HILARY FANNIN
'STEADY, BROODING savagery" was how one critic described Niall Toibin's explosive yet chilling interpretation of The Bull McCabe, the malevolent, land-obsessed character at the centre of John B Keane's epic play, The Field.
“Down in Listowel, about a year before he died, John B said to me: ‘you were a very small Bull’ – which I was. Joe Lynch and Ray McAnally were bigger, broader Bulls, but they were not as evil. ‘You were a very small Bull,’ said John B, ‘but you frightened the shite out of them.’ It’s in the writing, that hatred,” adds the markedly more benevolent, and recently octogenarian, Toibin, sitting opposite me in his local hotel, the rain lashing off the castellated roof, the diamond-paned windows shuddering under the assault of yet another howling seaside gale.
Having asked the pert receptionist whether there was somewhere quiet to talk, away from the tinklingly insistent Christmas carols piping through the reception area, we were directed to a small, dark anteroom, decorated like an elaborately gothic confessional, complete with swirling drapery, where Toibin, no stranger to donning dog collars and an impermeable priestly gauze in some of his many film, television and theatre roles, looked right at home.
It’s been 20 years, give or take, since I last saw Toibin, since the nights he gored the stage of the Moscow Arts Theatre with his diminutive but fierce Bull. Back then, as a deeply insignificant member of the Abbey touring company that spluttered out of Shannon Airport on an Aeroflot plane smelling vaguely of cabbage, I’d had trouble distinguishing the actor from his role. The sardonic rage and sheer Bullishness of Keane’s character seemed to have subsumed the man who was playing him – or maybe it was the other way around.
“You were ferocious. We were all terrified of you,” I reminded him.
“If I lost my temper, I lost it completely,” Toibin admits, smiling with gentle amusement in the strange gloom of our little room. “If I got an idiotic direction from some director, I lost it. I had a bad temper. Nobody’s perfect.”
He shrugs. “We used to go on holidays, outside Killarney, to my mother’s family. This preoccupation with land, an obsession about 25 yards of ground, I knew exactly what that was about. In my uncle’s house I’d climb up the ladder, up to the bed in the rafters, and hear them talk until two o’clock in the morning, their voices carrying up to the roof, about the land and who got what.”
FROM THE EARLY 1950s, when the young Corkonian quit his job in the Civil Service and joined the RTÉ radio repertory company, and through a career that has spanned more than half a century, garnering awards at home, in London and on Broadway, the actor’s reputation for truculence and an uneasy brilliance has preceded him. He has never been shy of conflict.
Along with writers Eoghan Harris and Wesley Burrowes, Toibin ploughed a furrow into the virgin earth of Irish satire in such television shows as Time Now, Mr T,back in the polite old days when Raidio Teilifís Éireann was still shaking off its test card and when The Late Late Show, on which Toibin was a frequent guest, was, as he says, "our benediction".
“Harris was hilarious and brilliant. Fascist? Communist? Catholic? At that time he was very left-wing and very funny,” Toibin says. “And Wesley? Wesley was a fantastic writer.”
Time Now, Mr T bit the dust after Toibin and co managed to offend the pulpit with a sketch about self-abuse, when Toibin, in drag, helpfully suggested that when one was tempted to “self-abuse”, one should simply “get out of the house and abuse someone else” (a suggestion steeped in irony given the current revelations dominating the news). When the pulpits began their campaign against the entertainer, when the envelopes of excrement were being pushed through Toibin’s letterbox and when the telephone was ringing off the hook with admonishments from some of his enraged countrymen – “they had already started ringing in before the punchline,” he says – RTÉ did not back up the programme or the production team, or in any way attempt to defy the hysterical denunciations of some of the country’s more conservative elements. Instead, the programme was decommissioned.
Toibin explains that there were people working for the national broadcaster at that time, in positions of authority, who felt the need to play it safe and who wished to avoid disagreement with the Catholic Church.
When, a couple of years ago, TG4 commissioned a biographical documentary on Toibin and the production crew went to RTÉ looking for archive footage from Time Now, Mr T, they found that the series had been wiped.
“All gone, all wiped, one or two bits found in a cellar that survived,” Toibin says. “The whole series destroyed. I’ve offended so many people.
“I don’t know . . . Some people in power . . . I don’t know.” He smiles again over the rim of his coffee cup, and his pale blue eyes easily relinquish their anxiety. “I get a salute sometimes, in Galway or Waterford: ‘Howiya, Niall, go on and give it to them’.” He takes a sip. With his aquiline nose, small mobile hands, weathered skin, he looks like a judicious bird of prey at rest.
Toibin caught a lucky break after the dissolution of Time Now, Mr T, when the then artistic director of the Royal National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre, Bill Bryden, offered him two years' repertory work with the British company. A chance to lie low and at the same time expand his career, the Cottesloe stint led to Toibin being cast in the phenomenally successful televised adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, where, cast as yet another Catholic priest, he coached John Gielgud in the gentle art of dying.
Toibin is a fantastic mimic, and with the easy grace of an old pro he slips into a breathy Gielgud, imitating the great but somewhat vague and forgetful actor’s speech after a fellow cast member had invited the cast and crew to dinner in a local inn, during which she had screened her most famous, and extremely French, movie to her guests over dessert. “‘My dear, wonderful dinner. It was a wonderful dinner, wasn’t it, Niall?’ ‘Oh it was, a wonderful dinner.’ ‘Wonderful dinner,’ continued Gielgud, ‘but f***ing awful movie’.”
THROUGHOUT THE 1980s, Toibin was flitting between Yorkshire, Manchester and Dublin in various comedy and drama series, including Stay Lucky, with the endlessly cocky Cockney, Dennis Waterman. At a time when many Irish actors would have bartered their grandmothers for the chance of a walk-on, the pragmatic and dogged Toibin was making a good living, dashing home during breaks in rehearsal and filming to his wife Judy and their five children (one son and four daughters) in their rambling family house in Harold's Cross.
“The National were paying me 150 quid a week,” he recalls, his palpable sense of achievement reinvigorating his memories. “A few days after I arrived, the Irish pound was devalued, so I was sending home the equivalent of 200 quid a week!”
Toibin had already made his mark on Broadway, where, much earlier, in 1970, he had picked up a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance, in the Tony Award-winning production of Brendan Behan's autobiographical Borstal Boy.
"I knew Behan very well and we were good friends," he says. "Behan loved the Irish language, but he didn't like people who spoke it professionally. He'd switch from English to Irish over a pint." Toibin's posthumous portrayal of Behan electrified audiences, while critics described his portrayal as an invocation, something almost spiritual.
“It was an extraordinary time,” Toibin says. “Judy and the kids came over, we had an apartment, they loved it. I have a great affinity to New York, good pals there. It was an extraordinary time, apart from the fact that I nearly drank myself to death. Wild nights,” he adds, with a thirsty finality. “Wild, wild nights.”
I want to talk about Judy, I want to talk about the drink. Through all our career chat, Judy, the love of his life, and drink, his nemesis, pulse beneath the conversation like a dark river. But to get there we must first trace back.
Toibin came to Dublin at the age of 17, barely legally entitled to take up his job in the Civil Service. Bright and inquisitive, he was the favoured son of a strictly disciplinarian father, a teacher and Gaelgeoir who never once spoke English to any of his family (although Toibin has letters written by him in English to various family friends, which show a man well-acquainted with, and even talented at, expressing himself as Béarla).
He recalls no particular hardship during his years at North Monastery CBS, and describes his family home, albeit not without its difficulties, as a relatively happy place which fostered tenacity. His mother he remembers as wise, humorous and understanding, a woman who put up with his father’s idiosyncrasies.
“Father never hit you, but he was very stern. There were rules to be obeyed,” Toibin says. “My mother would say that he always looked after everyone, that yes, he had his oddities, he wouldn’t speak English, but then some men might not speak to you at all!” Home was, he concludes, “a peculiar kind of a house, but ultimately it sharpened your wits”.
Toibin barely looked back after arriving in Dublin to take up his job, codifying the results of the 1946 census. The transition from the kneeling rosary, under the guidance of his devout father, to mad nights of socialising with the recently demobbed second World War veterans with whom he shared the census office (“someone had the brilliant idea of keeping them all together – they were a howl, absolutely”) was no great hardship.
“I grew up very fast. I went mad drinking,” he says. “Cork meant nothing to me then, but as the years went on it meant more and more. I carry my exile around with me. I love Cork. Cork people are hilariously funny.”
IN DUBLIN, MEANWHILE, “there was a pal of mine I used to have a jar with. His mother and his sister had two houses in Stamer Street, 15 girls between them, then two or three men, lodgers. I took a room as a lodger. One morning I was having a shave in the bathroom when the door burst open. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, get out of the feckin’ way, I’ll be late,’ said a girl.” She pushed him away from the sink, hurriedly washed her face and teeth, and disappeared as suddenly as she had arrived. Who was that, he inquired of his landlady. “Oh, that one? Judy Kenny. She’s as mad as a hatter!” That night the couple had their first date, Judy dragging a friend along with her. They went to the dogs in Harold’s Cross and they never looked back.
We talk about Judy, who was, says Toibin – momentarily looking stunned by loss – great, great fun, with her mad bridge and whisky parties, her vigour, her love of life, her spirit, sitting up in bed with a bridge hand in the midst of her monumental battle with cancer. Their four daughters are, he says, just like her. Judy’s death almost a decade ago, after an eight-year illness, still haunts Toibin’s face.
“We went for a last holiday to Eastbourne,” he recalls. “The manager at the hotel welcomed us, and told us they had a very distinguished guest, a countryman of ours who was a regular visitor to the hotel.” Ian Paisley was the gentleman’s name, they were informed by their host, do you know him at all? “We laughed, Judy and I,” he says, his pale eyes blurring. “We laughed.” After Judy’s death, Toibin sold the family house. He was, he says, “a little bit crazy rattling around there without her”.
Toibin stopped drinking on March 22nd, 1974. His last act as a drinker was to fall out of the Belfast-to-Dublin train and land on the platform at Connolly Station. He was poured into a taxi and spent the following week drying out in hospital.
“You can continue to drink like this, or you can continue to work like this, but you cannot do both,” explained his doctor before calmly leaving Toibin to ponder his future.
“Without being sentimental, I realised that it was having a terrible effect on Judy, and don’t ask me how I never went back, but I have great willpower,” Toibin says.
One cannot help but feel sympathy and affection for this tenacious man who hurled himself into the storm of an unforgiving business, who fought and loved and howled and drank and fought again to find his equilibrium. A crumpled warrior now, at ease in his high-backed brocade hotel chair, his trademark edge and drive occasionally ebbs.
He has never been content to confine himself by genre, and has simply refused to accept periods of resting, that actorly euphemism for unemployment. “It’s a vicious profession – up there today, tomorrow they don’t ring you back,” he says. So, along with acting roles, he has always done long stints in stand-up comedy and cabaret, a commitment he has only recently relinquished.
“A year and a half ago, I said enough is enough. I didn’t realise really how hard I’d worked: six shows a week, week after week, travel, hotel, travel. It became such a normality that when I finally stopped I went into a sort of decline.” What precipitated your decision to stop, I ask.
“I had a couple of dries [on stage], but it’s my own stuff, so I can jump on to something else,” he says. But then one night Toibin had a complete blank. He tried to fight it, but the lines wouldn’t come back and he had to cut the show. That was when he made the decision to call a halt. He told himself: “If you do carry on, the only thing that will be remembered is that you have lost it – that horrible expression. They’ll say: ‘He’s not up to it, he doesn’t have it any more’.”
Now, almost two years on, Toibin is conducting himself with ease. He loves radio, the place where he learned his trade, and is pleased still to be in demand. His family, which now includes grandchildren, are a source of great happiness and he has found himself a new perch near the howling sea and the Royal Dublin Golf Club. This club is a place in which he would dearly like to spend more time if only Ireland’s three-year downpour would cease its incessant rattle long enough for a man to get his driver out.
As we brave the car park to retrieve our shivering cars, the sky glowers yet again with pent-up precipitation.
I think someone should buy Mr Toibin an indoor putting set for Christmas.
EARLY LIFEBorn in Cork city in 1929, youngest son of an exclusively Irish-speaking teacher.
CAREERAn actor for 60 years, his radio, television, film, stage and cabaret work have garnered many awards including a Drama Desk award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor on Broadway for his portrayal of Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy.
PIVOTAL MOMENTBringing Judy Kenny to the dogs in Harold's Cross and embarking on a lifelong partnership together.
