As a youngster in Ennis, Simone Kirby was kicked out of her local cinema for mucking about, and banned for the rest of her adolescence. She declines to reveal the extent of her misdemeanour, but claims it wasn’t too dramatic. So she didn’t try to set fire to the place or anything?
“No, God, no,” says the actress, looking horrified on the far side of a table in Dublin’s Chester Beatty library. “It was just messing. I was really giddy when I was younger. I used to get into trouble all the time in school. I was banned from that cinema for years. Every time I tried to get back in they would recognise me and say, ‘No, not you. Get out,’ so I’d have to go to the cinema in Galway. Because I was banned, I got to see more theatre than film.”
If Kirby is found in a Co Clare cinema these days, it’s more likely to be on the screen than in the audience. In 2016, four of the actress’s films have appeared at festivals and cinemas around the world. For more than a decade she plied her trade on stage, but her cinematic banishment is now over.
“I stopped doing theatre because I had a child,” she says of her decision to stop treading the boards five years ago. “To go back to theatre would have been tricky. It’s very time-consuming. Financially, you don’t get as much for the work you do.”
Notes on Blindness leads the pack of Kirby’s new releases, certainly among critics. The film tells the story of John Hull, an English theologian who recorded his descent into blindness on cassette tapes during the 1980s. The actress plays Marilyn, Hull’s loving wife, who took part in the recordings. In an unusual filming process, the actors mimed along to the tapes during the reconstruction scenes. The result is a poetic portrait of a family trying to understand a devastating disability; a hybrid of documentary and drama.
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“The directors created the soundscape of the film before we started filming,” she says. “They put together the audio in the order they wanted to tell the story and gave me a Dictaphone so I could listen to Marilyn. I got so used to her voice, her manner of speaking, tone, rhythm, that I would read a line and could predict how she was going to say the words before I even listened to the tape. By the time I met her, I felt I already knew her.”
This encounter was tinged with sadness, however. Marilyn Hull visited the film set two weeks after her husband had died.
Kirby already had some knowledge of blindness. In 2004, she acted in John Synge’s The Well of the Saints, which features blind characters. In 2011, she played the blind protagonist in Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney. She spent time with blind people as part of her research for both projects.
In The Truth Commissioner, another recent film, she plays the sister of a victim of terrorism. The story is fictional, but her scenes in a mock courthouse in Belfast, where extras were encouraged to bring mementos from the Troubles, felt real. “We were surrounded by history. A woman sitting behind me showed me a picture of her schoolfriend, a little girl who died during the Troubles. You realise the weight of what you are doing. You’re telling real stories.”
Kirby is no stranger to unorthodox projects, having worked with Ken Loach on Jimmy’s Hall, the true story of Jimmy Gralton, an Irish political activist who was deported to America in 1933. Playing Gralton’s fictional love interest, her preparation involved dance classes, political debate and trips to Leitrim, where the story took place.
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“Ken’s way of working is lovely. On set, there’s a community spirit — that’s his socialism bleeding into his work, for sure. It taught me not to overthink, not to map out what I am doing. Know my character’s history, and play each scene with that in mind, rather than knowing where they are headed. Live in the present.”
This mantra was facilitated by Loach’s unusual method of making his films chronologically and drip-feeding the script to his cast. “It’s great to play a scene that is supposed to be the day after a scene you played yesterday,” says Kirby. “It’s a nicer way of working — much more like theatre.”
Theatre, she believes, gave her an impulse to seek a wide variety of stories and characters of differing nationalities and ages. She declines to indulge her own age — giving me two fingers in response to the query — explaining it could restrict the roles she is offered.
After leaving Clare, via Galway, she studied her craft at the Gaiety School of Acting from 1998 to 2000. Then she plunged into theatrical work. While she enjoyed Friel, Synge, Billy Roche and other sober fare, the self-confessed messer, the nemesis of Ennis cinema ushers, was instinctively drawn to sketch shows and comedy clubs.
Kirby performed in comedic plays such as The Tinker’s Wedding in 2004, and Des Bishop’s Shooting Gallery the following year. She established her own comedy production company with a friend, Oonagh McLaughlin, writing and performing an hour-long show for 2005’s Dublin Fringe. Mind Your Fingers was a montage of sketches that included drunken bridesmaids and a snail molesting a crow. It culminated in a fight between the two actresses.
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“It didn’t feel like a play. It was madness,” she says. “We would do things that were grotesque, that had a darkness. Women’s sense of humour sometimes has a dark twist. It was quite a female sensibility but it didn’t exclude men, because it was raucous and slapstick.”
In 2011, she teamed up with PJ Gallagher, a classmate from her Gaiety days, to make Meet Your Neighbours, an RTE sketch show. This featured another litany of dark and deranged characters. With shows such as Republic of Telly now in jeopardy, Kirby argues that it is important to nurture native comedy.
“A lot of the time we buy in international shows, but Irish comedy is brilliant. We have to invest in it because our sense of humour is unique.”
In recent years, she has worked on dramatic television shows such as Peaky Blinders and Love/Hate. The Flag (2016) is a comedy, but she plays “the straight guy” to Pat Shortt.
She also plays it straight as the Mad Hatter’s mother in Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016). The zany nature of the set, costume and story allowed her to act larger than life, though. “That was pure silliness. Being chased around, going, ‘Aaargh.’ Johnny Depp was really giddy, full of chat. There were a lot of laughs. He and Helena Bonham Carter would try a lot of stuff out. All of us [supporting cast], would go, ‘Great, we can follow that.’ The sense of play was there.
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We meet on a day off from her job on the sequel to Rebellion, RTE’s 1916 drama, which is being reimagined for the Irish War of Independence. She recently wrapped Steven, a film about the early life of Morrissey, the Smiths frontman. Kirby plays his mother, whom she describes as a big influence on the crooner.
“She was a vegetarian, worked in a library, loved books, introduced him to a lot of her favourite music. She gave him money to go to concerts in London. She was really supportive; a strong Irish woman.”
The actress is now considering emerging from stage retirement for a play at the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival. “If it was just doing a television show, or acting from the neck up, I’d be bored out of my mind,” she confesses. Simone Kirby’s restless spirit ensures there is never a dull moment, on screen or in the aisles.
The Flag is on RTE1 on Christmas Day at 11pm. Notes on Blindness, The Truth Commissioner and Alice Through the Looking Glass are all out now on VOD and DVD