Out on the street, as a couple of traditional musicians let rip with a bodhrβn and a whistle, it's definitely Galway. Inside the well-insulated windows of the Spanish Arch Hotel, however, the actress Glenne Headly is doing a rap that is pure New York.
Odd, that, because, although she grew up in New York, she has spent most of her adult life in Chicago and Los Angeles. She doesn't have an accent, either, doesn't say "Noo Yawk" or any of that. But New York writes her speeches.
Listen: "How did I come to be doing a play by Geraldine Aron at Druid? Well, my agent called me up in September - shortly after the evil deed in New York, you know - and he said, 'Glenne, I know you probably won't want to do a play right now'. And I said, 'Probably not.' My little boy was just starting at his school, and it's a very parent-participatory school, I'm a volunteer there and I had just started in September, too, so I was very excited about it. So he said, 'Well, I know you really won't want to do one that's abroad - but I'm gonna tell you what it is anyway.' But he said, 'First I'm gonna tell you where it is. It's in Ireland.' I said, 'Oh - where?' And he said, 'It's in Galway'. And I said 'OOOOHHH - tell me more.' He said, 'Well, Garry Hynes is directing it.' And I said, 'Uh-huh?' He said, 'It's a new play'. And I said, 'Hmmm . . . ' "
Headly pauses. Not for breath, mind you - for dramatic effect. Breath she doesn't seem to need. She is skinny and nervy and, despite lips glossed with the sort of effortless perfection beloved of magazine make-up commercials, extremely pale. She attacks a bowl of soup as she speaks; this is, after all, supposed to be a lunch-break.
Reading between the lines, though, you get the feeling that rehearsals for My Brilliant Divorce haven't exactly been a piece of cake. Not two weeks before that phone call from her agent, Headly was walking on the strand at Ballyvaughan - she just happened to be on holiday in Ireland with her family, meeting up with an actress friend who happened to be working in England - gazing across the bay and thinking how wonderful it would be to do a play in Galway. Now that the dream has come true, reality has intervened with a vengeance: short rehearsal period, script changes, sleepless nights.
There are, of course, compensations. Aron's portrait of a woman struggling to get a handle on life in the divorce lane is hilarious, moving and, ultimately, uplifting. "New plays are always hard work - and it's a one-woman show, too, which is even harder. But, although there are some sad things in it, it's really funny, this play.
"I did Aunt Dan & Lemon at the Almeida in London two years ago, and that was very, very drying on me emotionally because it's a very, very depressing play - and it's hard to do that every night."
My Brilliant Divorce may be a one-woman show, but isn't this a tale of three women - writer Geraldine Aron, director Garry Hynes and Headly? "Yeah." Headly laughs. "A lot of oestrogen. I hadn't really thought about that, but I suppose it means there's probably a lot of freedom to articulate. Look, I mean, women just talk more than men. That's pretty much fact. So we've been able to talk freely among each other. And there's a certain . . . gentleness, which I would assume one would attribute to the feminine influence.
"But frankly, if you just have a play about women, you're going to leave out half your audience. This is a play about a person who got kind of side-swiped and is trying to right herself. I think a lot of men carelate to that, whether they've been divorced or not - relate to that feeling of being in a new situation which is the complete opposite of where you've been before."
Headly learned her craft as an actor with Steppenwolf in Chicago, joining up when it was still something of a suburban garage set-up. "We did everything - running the office, taking the phone calls, selling tickets, props. We did get a stage manager, then we got a sound person - then we got an electrician, that was good."
At one point, costumes were her responsibility - on budgets which would make a shoestring look like a luxury. "I remember clothing a cast of 36 on $100. It was a period piece, so I needed, like, platform boots and stuff - well, I found plenty of 'em in thrift stores for veterans, which sold shoes for 25 cents. There were at least 10 leather coats in there, too," she adds, proudly.
Theatrically, the Steppenwolf ethic was all-embracing. "To stretch ourselves as actors and to do, basically, whatever we wanted to do - no holds barred on casting. We wanted to do things which were more realistic, more daring, which just kind of shook things up. For many years we tried to come up with a motto or modus operandi which we could state when we were trying to get funding - but we never could. We tried, many times. The same thing would always come up: 'We are trying to do the best theatre we can'. I said, 'Every theatre in the world is gonna say that - do you think other people think they're doing something bad?' "
Headly is now an accomplished stage actress, with a lengthy biography which includes Say Goodnight Gracie, Balm in Gilead, Coyote Ugly, Arms and the Man and The Miss Firecracker Contest, which earned her four Joseph Jefferson awards. But if her name is familiar, it's probably from the movies. Aren't they a step down from theatre work - or, at least, for a serious actor, less interesting?
"Well, it's not that there's less interest," she says, "it's that the requirements are different. I love movies. I grew up with black and white movies on television. But as an actor in a movie, you lose all kinds of control. It's not edited by you; they don't pick the takes that you might like; they might pick the beginning of it from take one and the middle of it from take two, and it's all a jumble. It's not an actor's medium. It's a director's medium."
Asked to name her favourite of the films she has made, however, she cites three. "Maybe Dirty Rotten Scoundrels; maybe Dick Tracy; kind of Mortal Thoughts. That's about it. In Mortal Thoughts, I feel like I got to really act. Because, let's face it, in life I basically am the girl in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Janet - I mean, that pretty much is me. Whereas in Mortal Thoughts, I had to be this other character who was really different from me, so that was more challenging and more exciting. Dick Tracy didn't really require a lot - although it's not all that easy to talk in abbreviated comic-strip speak. Seems like it would be, but it isn't."
The soup has long since disappeared, followed by a healthy plateful of bread. It seems churlish to gobble up her precious lunch break without asking Headly if there's anything she wants to talk about.
There is. Us. "I really like Ireland," she says, visibly uncurling as she conjures up beehive huts and badger's lairs and hiking in the Burren. "It's not just the sense of something mystical, magical, but that storytelling thing, it's all part of the culture. It's very complex, and it's very" - she attacks the word, makes a stabbing movement with her hand - "quick. Just like the music. Very dextrous. Also, a lot of people are funny. It has really surprised me, how many funny exchanges you hear in the shops. And the quickness. It's in the music, in the stitchery, in the way people talk. Everything . . . skips, you know?"
Out in Quay Street, the musicians have stopped to blow on their hands. A small crowd is urging them to play another couple of tunes and, despite a hefty breeze swirling off the water, they oblige. Bodhrβn and banter. Dammit, I think she may be on to something.
My Brilliant Divorce opens at the Druid Theatre, Galway, on Wednesday. Booking on 091-569777