Back on solid ground after the fall

For all her success, Eileen Walsh dreams of regaining the confidence she had as a 17-year-old actor, afraid of nothing and sure…

For all her success, Eileen Walsh dreams of regaining the confidence she had as a 17-year-old actor, afraid of nothing and sure of her craft

EILEEN WALSH remembers a time when it was all so easy; when her acting was effortless, unselfconscious, and her work ethic had all the wide-eyed innocence of an untainted paradise.

It was the opening night of her first professional job, in Rough Magic's production of Gina Moxley's Danti-Dan, and Walsh, then a seventeen-year-old ingénue, arrived to work ten minutes before she was due to open the play. Her director was livid, her writer anxious. "Who do you think you are?" she was asked, although it's unclear whether at that stage of her career Walsh yet had the answer.

"I wasn't head-wrecked about it," she recalls, today a warm and engaging presence. "I didn't know what I know now." What Walsh now knows, 13 years later, goes beyond the professional courtesy of showing up to work at least an hour before walking on stage (these days she is usually the first person in the theatre) to include first-hand experience of the peaks and troughs of so precarious a profession.

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As one of the most talented stage actors of her generation she has inhabited roles as diverse as the violent Runt in Enda Walsh's extraordinary Disco Pigs, to the exhilarating speaker of Mark O'Rowe's grimly fantastical Terminus. On film she has distinguished herself in character roles such as Crispina, a tragic victim of Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, and the anxious young Midlands woman in Eugene O'Brien's compelling television drama Pure Mule.

But while she has received rave notices for her performances and recently scooped major awards for her achievements - taking the award for Best Actress at this year's Irish TimesTheatre Awards for Terminus, and recently named Best Actress at the Tribeca Film Festival for her role in Eugene O'Brien's Eden- she has also known confidence-shaking periods of unemployment and will readily confess to terrifying bouts of stage fright. No wonder she thinks back to Danti-Danwith such amusement and fondness.

"I've learned so much since then. I love the rules of the theatre and the respect you need to show each other. But I also love my confidence at that point, thinking it will take me two minutes to get ready. I wish I had that still." She makes it sound like the time before the fall.

Appropriately enough then, Walsh is here to talk about another paradise lost in Eden, the film adaptation of Eugene O'Brien's 2001 play, which now receives a much-deserved cinema release at Dublin's Lighthouse Cinema. Although it is a film of uncommon intimacy, moving from the vivid articulation of the play to an eloquence of silent moments and whispered words, Declan Recks's film had clear ambitions to be seen on a big screen. (It premiered during the Dublin International Film Festival and was later broadcast on RTE.)

This limited release gives us the chance to savour the dreamlike imagery of Owen McPolin's cinematography while observing the quiet despair of Walsh's Breda and Aidan Kelly's Billy, as the spark of their ten-year marriage is slowly, poignantly extinguished and they rage against the dying of its light.

It was a part that Walsh almost didn't pursue as a point of principle: her sister, Catherine Walsh, had originated the role onstage and eventually insisted that Eileen audition for it. "It was the most amazing performance that I'd seen her do," Eileen recalls.

"I've seen her do brilliant performances before and after, but that was a point where it all came together: for writer, director and actors. And that's a lovely thing to watch because it doesn't happen all the time. Part of me wanted her to see it through to fruition, if I'm honest, because that's only fair. But the business is so horrible, sometimes you don't get to do it. And no better girls for understanding it either. We know what the business is like."

Indeed, when Disco Pigswas adapted for film, Eileen was passed over for the part of Runt, while her co-star, Cillian Murphy, remained. To have been sundered from such a collaborative effort clearly still burns, and it may have contributed to Walsh's obvious sense of self-consciousness, one that rings through in frequent disarmingly jocular but defensive remarks.

When asked about her drive towards theatre, for instance, she adopts a forced cheeriness and says, "Well, with a face like this, theatre is my main thing actually. Because it's harder to sell yourself movie-wise unless it's a character-driven part." This rather uncharitable self-assessment belies Walsh's unique physical versatility and a capacity to seem either plain or beautiful as a part requires. In The Drowned World, we were asked to accept her as a grotesque, while her updated Pegeen Mike for the Abbey's Playboy of The Western Worldwas a near-looker with a brilliantly awful bleached-blonde hairdo. Edenalso exploits her unconventional beauty, as a lonely Breda battles with her weight and self-image, poignantly insecure about her own desirability.

Walsh's professional drive betrays no uncertainties or insecurities. Growing up in Cork she found a natural aptitude towards performance, delighting in the Saturday morning workshops in the Crawford Gallery from the age of 13. "Not to be egotistical, but I just knew I was good at it," she says. "You could move people or make them laugh. I always knew it was where I was going. I couldn't understand it when I didn't get jobs, but it would never bother me. It was always a part of me."

Following Danti-Dan, she pursued acting studies in Trinity College while tasting major success with Corcadorca's Disco Pigsduring her first year.

If Walsh seems to have an outside view of herself, her approach to work is conversely unmediated and instinctual. Her sister Catherine, she says, is intense and methodical, where she is inclined to wing it. Vicky Featherstone, the Scottish director and one of Walsh's most frequent collaborators, has spoken of her as a kind of risk-enabling muse. "Rehearsing with her is a massive process of discovery," Featherstone once said, "because I never know how she's going to approach a character."

For her part Walsh is content to outline her rituals - her recent conversion to running, the two songs she always sings as a vocal warm-up - but is wary of discussing her processes. "It's so hard to talk about that kind of stuff, because I don't know really how I approach something."

She will put the script down as soon as possible, she allows, because otherwise, "you're not embodying anything, you're not helping anyone."

DISCUSSING TERMINUS, which she considers a personal highlight of a particularly successful year - one that began with an eight-week commitment to the Abbey's production of Savedand turned into a year of consistent work with the theatre - Walsh can sound both fearless and troubled by the experience.

She was unafraid to challenge writer and director Mark O'Rowe over the flights of fantasy she had to deliver, ("Really, Mark," she said of her most thrilling passage, "can we not cut it? It's such a boy's thing.") but was severely unnerved by the pressures of performing its unforgiving rhymes and rhythms.

"I've never done anything that's made me so scared," she says. "Your fear is that you drop a line. Your fear is that you forget. And if you fuck up, the audience know you fuck up. No one else can save you, like in a normal play."

Coming after a confidence-sapping year spent without work, such pressures brought about a terrifying stretch of stage fright in the 30-year-old actor, accentuated by the fact that her husband Stuart McCaffer and their two-year-old daughter, Tippi, had moved from their home in Edinburgh to Dublin for the year.

"So there was an awful lot going on," she says, leavening her harrowing honesty with a tone of embarrassed good humour. "I cried on opening night before the show. I remember standing in that manky old laneway outside the Abbey and crying and just wanting not to go on. I vomited on my way home one night. I remember standing on stage another night just thinking, you could actually just leave. You don't have to be here . . . And it's awful when you feel like that." Her anxieties did not subside with Terminus's tour to New York and I wonder how she carried on through it.

"It sounds so naff," she responds. "I had two friends that passed away. And both of them, I feel, are responsible for the year I've had. And I started thinking, You're fine. You've got people looking out for you. You have to stay in the moment. Stop panicking. Stop thinking ahead."

It is not the first time that she has spoken of the importance of staying in the moment, or the pre-performance rituals that help silence her doubts and self-consciousness. For all her successes, though, the pressures never abate, they only change.

Great reviews, she thinks, leave you with a higher grace to fall from. Yet for all her concerns for the scrutiny and stresses of the outside world, in performance this extraordinary actress still seems truly free. There she sheds all reserve and recaptures the freedom of an uncorrupted world; each performance, in some small way, returning her to a personal Eden.

Eden is in The Lighthouse Cinema, Smithfield. The Abbey Theatre's production of Terminus tours to Edinburgh's Festival Fringe in August.