Doyle questions

`I feel like a very old racehorse who's suddenly found himself on his feet so long that he starts winning," says Tony Doyle, when I ask him what it feels like to be the father figure of Irish screen actors. "I've never seen myself as a father figure, because I've always been on the move rather than standing on legs of granite."

Sitting in Ardmore Studios last week during a break from filming the fifth series of Ballykissangel, Doyle is in typically self-deprecating form when talking about a long and varied career that has come full circle in recent years, bringing him back to the country he left more than 30 years ago.

But talk to his fellow actors or to crew members on Ballykissangel and other shoots and it's immediately clear in how much respect and affection Doyle is held by his peers and co-workers. "A true gentleman . . . a real professional . . . the best in the business" are some of the phrases they use to describe the man they call "Doyler".

"Well, I ply them with lots of drink," says Doyle wryly when I take him to task for all this unsolicited eulogising. The respect is not just for the man but for his remarkable recent body of work, recognised last year in a Lifetime Achievement award from the Film Institute of Ireland. As the grim patriarch in Amongst Women, the veteran gangster in I Went Down, the cute-hoor businessman in Ballykissangel, and now as the arrogant parish priest who leads the boycott of Protestants in Fethard-on-Sea, Co Wexford, in the current release, A Love Divided, Tony Doyle has come to epitomise that most ambiguous figure of the 1990s, the Irish father, in all his dubious glory. All the more remarkable, then, that he has spent most of his career working in the UK, with only occasional forays back home for appearances on stage or in films such as Eat the Peach and Circle of Friends.

"The only work in Ireland prior to that," he reflects, "was occasionally in theatre or in television drama, in the days when RTE used to do that. But now, obviously, everything has changed so much here."

Back in the mid-1960s, the young UCD graduate chose, as he puts it, "not to steer my talents into industry or commerce. I met a pair of fish-tights along the way. Drama was very interesting, if not as lucrative.

"I was acting on the fringe in Dublin, in the Pike Theatre and places like that. A play that we did, The Scattering, by James McKenna, transferred to London, supposedly en route to the West End, although it never quite made it there - but I stayed. There was a lot of work at the time. The London fringe was starting up, and there were plenty of opportunities in television."

He fondly recalls the one-off TV dramas of the 1960s and 1970s. "There were so many of them: The Play of the Month, the Wednesday Play, and so on . . . They called them plays, but actually they were all films. In England now the one-off drama is a thing of the past. It has been replaced by the series in an attempt, I suppose, to grab and hold on to the viewer."

He also continued to divide his work between stage and screen. Traditionally, he agrees, actors in Britain have been in a position to support their theatre work through television appearances, an option that up until recently wasn't available to actors on this side of the Irish Sea. "On the back of every theatre programme there will be a list of sponsors, and the one group of people who are never mentioned are the ones who are actually in the show, who subsidise it to the hilt. I was in a play in a subsidised, rather fashionable theatre just off the West End, and I was taking home £100 a week, with several mouths to feed.

"That takes a lot of subsidy, which comes from other work. I have a theory that actors would make great cabinet ministers or economists, because they manage to raise families and do all the other things people do, without having a proper job."

His own work in British TV includes appearances in such long-running series as Taggart, Peak Practice and Band of Gold, although it's probably his memorable performance as the morally ambiguous police officer John Deakin in the ground-breaking crime drama, Between the Lines, that most audiences remember.

"Between the Lines is a good example of something that would have been a feature-length play at one time but, because it got an extended run, it had a stronger effect on people's consciousness and it certainly made an impression," says Doyle.

He admits he was surprised - and not particularly impressed - when the same team responsible for Between the Lines approached him to appear in another projected series, a gentle comedy about an English priest living in a small Irish village. "No, I wasn't particularly interested in it," he says of Ballykissangel. "In fact, I didn't fancy it at all. It was the perseverance of the director, with whom I'd worked before, that finally got me involved. The director and producer had an extraordinary track record, so I couldn't understand why they'd taken themselves away from the cutting edge of contemporary drama to take a romp in the whimsical whin bushes of Co. Wicklow.

"They were over here, desperately looking for locations, so I could never contact them to talk about it, but they wouldn't take no for an answer. They said it wasn't going to be the way it seemed - there was all this humour, certainly, but there would be steely moments. So I agreed to do the first series, which was only six episodes, but then, of course, it was a huge success, beyond all belief."

He feels the series has grown since its inception in 1995, partly because it's not hampered by the narrow requirements of most formula television. "It took on a format which was quite surreal. Normally, these kinds of series are cops or medical or whatever and they're bound by that. But this had a sort of humour that could go anywhere. One still tries to give it a few seconds of reality amidst the comedy, though."

What of the criticism that Ballykissangel is a version of Ireland constructed for the benefit of middle England? "Well, that's probably true, which is why it's good to have those moments of reality in there at times. But, anyway, there's absolutely bugger all wrong with good entertainment."

There have been rumours of script difficulties and last-minute changes on the Ballykissangel set this year (although Doyle is far too much the professional to comment on such matters) and the series was thrown into further turmoil by the sad death of Birdy Sweeney two weeks ago.

Sometimes these kinds of things are pointers towards a show coming to the end of its natural life, but Doyle doesn't think that's the case yet for Ballykissangel. "I don't think it's been going on so long that it's likely to end just now." He feels that last year's changes - the departure of Stephen Tompkinson and Dervla Kirwan and the arrival of fresh faces like Victoria Smurfit and Lorcan Cranitch - have given the series a new lease of life. "After having run for a while it might have become smug and boring, so it's good that it has gone off in a different direction."

He sees the show, along with the other productions he's been involved with here in the past few years, as the welcome and long-overdue arrival of this country on the international film and television scene. Working with the young writer-director-producer team of Conor McPherson, Paddy Breathnach and Robert Walpole on the crime comedy, I Went Down, for example, he describes as "incredibly exciting. I remember trying and failing to get films off the ground myself here 20 years ago, when it was utterly impossible. It's great now that there's lots of talented people, lots of writers, talented young producers, although what we still really need is more producers."

The point is well taken - on the day we're talking in Ardmore, Ballykissangel is the only production shooting there, and the other stages are standing idle, reflecting a downturn in Irish film activity this year.

Last year, his performance in the television adaptation of John McGahern's Amongst Women won widespread praise, and nominations for several international awards. "One doesn't do it for the awards but it's really rather wonderful to get that recognition internationally for something which is so quintessentially Irish," he says.

The character of Moran, the destructively violent and repressive father, was familiar to him from the book. "And also that culture was familiar to me, because I'm from the west of Ireland, and my father would have known John McGahern's father. It was difficult to shoot, and the role was very demanding but also very rewarding.

"A television audience is a much wider audience. You have to engage them and draw them in before you drag them down into that awful hole which that man inhabits. At the very end he has a chilling line, just before he dies, where he shoots a crow just before he dies, and he says, `The closest I got to any man was when I had him in the sights of my gun.' That sums it up for many men of that generation. But, still, they got us to where we are now."

In A Love Divided, his performance as Father Stafford is a masterful portrayal of a man whose hubris leads him into waters way out of his depth. It would have been dangerously easy, I suggest, to descend into caricature. "Yes, and that would have been so boring. Syd Macartney, the director, did want to make sure that each character was fully rounded and believable."

Doyle sees A Love Divided as fulfilling a dramatic need to tell the stories of our shared past. "Some of the stories that are emerging couldn't possibly be told because they're too horrific. But there's been a wonderful cycle of rediscovery of the darker parts of our history in recent years."

Ballykissangel continues shooting until October, a gruelling 30-week schedule which he admits can be physically demanding. "It's grand, but it's a very long day, from six in the morning until eight or nine in the evening, and people do tire desperately towards the end of the shoot. But I love working here, because there's a different method of doing things. You work hard, but there's also time for fun, which you don't get in London."

Does he find there's much of a difference between working for television and for the cinema? "Well, technically, they're the same thing, but obviously, the work for television is more dialogue-oriented, whereas film is more visual and has a broader canvas."

It's been said that TV drama is a writer's medium and film a director's medium. "Yes, and the actor is always squeezed between the two! So unless you're very good or very loud, you can easily be lost."

So, does he agree with Liam Neeson's complaints about the lot of the actor vis-a-vis the director in modern films? The response is quintessential Tony Doyle: "He gets lots of props, lots of money and a nice costume. He shouldn't complain."

A Love Divided is currently on general release