Pauline McLynn doesn't seem worried that she might have been typecast as Shakespeare's shrew, she tells Donald Clarke
When I mention that Pauline McLynn is to play Kate, the titular harridan, in Rough Magic's upcoming production of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, people tend to react with uniform enthusiasm. "Oh, she was born for the part," they coo. This could be taken as something of a backhanded compliment. It is, of course, nice that so many punters are eager to see her on stage. It seems as if McLynn's performance as Mrs Doyle in Father Ted, her comic routines on the legendary radio series, Scrap Saturday, and the popular novels she has been writing for the past five years or so have helped transform her into an ornament to the nation.
BUT SHE MUST have mixed feelings about being regarded as such a neat fit for English literature's most bolshie romantic heroine. Would her husband, the theatrical agent Richard Cook, be likely to join in with the consensus? "Well now, he probably wouldn't contradict me if I said I was a bit shrewish," she laughs. "Richard is a much more benign sort of dictator. He is generally a very easy-going chap. We do have our sporting moments. Just last weekend I was going on at him about something. I was totally in the wrong. But he just stood there until I was finished and then said: 'I am going to bed'."
In truth, having known McLynn for (gulp) a quarter of a century, I have always found her an extremely equable sort. I first encountered her at Trinity College in the early 1980s, by which time she and that body of actors and directors who would later form Rough Magic had already transformed Dublin University Players into a theatrical company of near-professional standard. They came across as a terrifyingly self-confident bunch. McLynn and Lynne Parker, then the actor's room-mate, and now her director on The Taming of the Shrew, seemed older than most of their contemporaries.
"I look back and think people must have thought we were terribly self-confident," she says. "But I remember spending all my time hoping I wouldn't get found out. It was a splendid crop to be around with. I was hanging around with a lot of people who were very bright. I was only a middling scholar. But I think those people who were very bright were able to drag me along in their slipstream."
McLynn was born in Sligo in 1962, but moved to Galway with her family while still a slip of a thing. The city was, she emphasises, not the centre of boho chic it is today. Her mother did send her to elocution lessons, but in no other way was she groomed for a life on the stage.
"My father sold bits of cars all round Ireland, but, in fairness, he could sell absolutely anything and, I suppose, there is a kind of showmanship in that," she says. "My mother has said that I am the first person in the family to actually get paid for showing off." You wouldn't quite say that McLynn is a show-off. But there is certainly an element of performance to her conversation. Anecdotes are punctuated with lengthy asides, which, you feel, could as well be delivered, Restoration-comedy style, while inclined towards the orchestra stalls. One imagines that few directors, having listened to her speak, would feel the need to go through the rigmarole of an audition. Nonetheless, despite her obvious comic gifts, McLynn, like so many actors, did have to suffer a decade or so of poverty in her early years.
She did some fine work for Rough Magic and Galway's Druid Theatre Company in the years after graduation. Then Dermot Morgan spotted her frolicking in a supposedly educational TV series on RTÉ named Nothing To It. Morgan contacted Gerry Stembridge, the show's mastermind and a long-time buddy of McLynn's, and proposed the satirical entity that was to become Scrap Saturday. The radio show became a phenomenon in the late 1980s and helped establish McLynn, who provided all the female voices, as a notable comic presence.
SHE WAS, HOWEVER, far from being the producers' first choice for Mrs Doyle on the mighty Father Ted. The deranged housekeeper was, it should be recalled, at least 30 years older than McLynn and considerably more hideous. "I got it because they were desperate," she says. "People had been saying to the producers that this would be good for Pauline McLynn and Gerry Stembridge had said to me that I should go for it. But they kept saying: 'No. She's not old enough.'
They eventually went back to London without finding their Mrs Doyle and, desperate, had this final round up of actors. Hubbards [ casting directors] said: 'Oh, give her a go.' And I sort of got the humour immediately."
Despite being uncompromising in its Irishness, Father Ted became a huge success on both sides of the Irish Sea. There must, however, have been downsides to the show's popularity. A classic episode sees Richard Wilson, star of the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave, beat up Ted when the priest bellows his character's catchphrase - "I don't believe it!" - at the holidaying actor. How close has McLynn come to reacting similarly when members of the public have urged her to "Go on, go on, go on"? "More or less every day someone says it to me. But you can't be on a great show like that and not expect a reaction. I know that Frank Kelly tells people to 'Feck off' and they think it's part of the act, but it's not always."
Dermot Morgan, Father Ted himself, died in 1998, shortly after the third series finished shooting. The creative team had expected the show to end after three series, but the realisation that the possibility of any further episodes being commissioned had now been extinguished must have been difficult for McLynn. Father Ted had, after all, made her a star.
"Well in some ways I was lucky, in that I'd been a jobbing actor before the series began," she explains. "But I had always got very depressed after each series. Every time we would think: God, are we ever going to get a job again? After it was all over, there was always this fear that I would walk into an audition and they would say: 'No. We don't want her. We want that older lady.'"
As things have worked out, McLynn has scarcely been off our radars in the years since Father Ted ended. She turned up as the sour Aunt Aggie in Angela's Ashes. She was seen lurking around Kate Winslet and Geoffrey Rush in Quills. Other roles on television and stage came her way and, then, in 2000, she published her first novel, Something for the Weekend. The populist private-eye tale sold well and four more books have followed in its wake.
"There was this spill-over from Father Ted I think," she muses. "People expected them to be funny books and there are funny things in them, but they are not comic novels as such. I don't think I'd be able to write a comic novel. My life is actually not funny all the time." Whose is? Last year her father passed away and she found the process of preparing the paperback edition of her latest novel a useful diversion. "I had to go over the proofs of the book as my dad was dying. I was somewhat distracted, but in some senses it was the perfect environment to do that. I would be sitting beside the bed and thinking: there is a far greater thing happening here beside me, but I have to keep going. He didn't seem to mind. Well, he didn't say so, if he did."
THAT TRAGEDY ASIDE, McLynn seems to be in a fairly good place right now. In 1997 she and Cook got hitched at a sumptuous ceremony in Kilkenny Cathedral. For a while after the wedding - like Mia Farrow and Woody Allen - they didn't occupy the same house. McLynn is, however, quick to point out that this was because they had responsibilities in different cities. They now live in Phibsboro. "We went on our honeymoon for two weeks and that was the longest we had ever spent together," she laughs.
Recently, McLynn has been busier than ever. Later this year she starts on a situation comedy, Jam and Jerusalem, written by and starring Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. Last week her most recent film, the impressive Gypo, screened at the JamesonDublin International Film Festival. McLynn stars as a frayed mother and wife who is the only friend of a family of Czech refugees in Margate. Filmed under the strict dicta of the Dogma 95 Movement, this grim picture is as far from Father Ted as it is possible to get.
And then there is The Taming of the Shrew. The production, which co-stars the imitable Owen Roe as Petruchio, Kate's lover, relocates the story to rural Ireland in the 1970s. If the hilarious posters are anything to go by, it should be a hoot.
"I don't want to pre-empt the piece, because we haven't given our first public performance of it yet," she says, before having a mock attack of the vapours. "Oh God. We open in a few days. I think I just voided myself a little. But it is quite serious in a way. Because we set it in Ireland of the 1970s it becomes a little grimmer than you might expect. I think people will be squirming. People will remember those grey, grim days. Women were used as part of a deal like a cow. That is the way it was. Not that this is a feminist production. I would die if it was regarded as that."
So, with so much achieved and so much intriguing work in progress, does McLynn still have any ambitions remaining?
"Well when I began writing books a lot of people in the media were quite upset. 'She's an actress. She's Mrs Doyle. She should stay in that box.' Well I didn't have that job forever, so I had to move on and try something else. It wouldn't have been very interesting if I hadn't. My only real ambition is to not waste people's time."
The Taming of the Shrew runs from Mar 6 to Mar 25 at Project, Essex St, Dublin, Tel: 01-8819613 or see www.project.ie