Stephen Rea’s reputation precedes him, both as an award-winning, acclaimed actor and as a reluctant interviewee. So when he finally agrees to sit down with The Sunday Times, I am nervous.
Actually, I am surprised he agreed to do it at all. “It’s not necessary,” Rea agrees. Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, the show he is here to promote, sold out almost immediately. He does interviews because people cajole him into them. In this instance, because Eugene Downes, director of Kilkenny Arts Festival, asked and Rea likes him. “I suspect what he wants is to see the words ‘Kilkenny festival’ in print.”
In Kilkenny, the actor will be performing an abridged version of the long love letter written by the playwright while in prison for homosexuality. Rea is a fan of Wilde and the more he talks — he is prone to trailing off — the more connections he finds. “I’d actually played Oscar Wilde in a play called Saint Oscar by Terry Eagleton,” the actor says, recalling how moved he was to meet Wilde’s grandson.
Rea’s second son is named Oscar. Rea recounts Oscar’s baptism in a London church built on the site of an orphanage funded by the family of Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, the man to whom Wilde penned the famous love letter. “Isn’t that weird?” muses Rea. Wilde’s family spent a lot of time in the west of Ireland, while Rea has brought his sons to Donegal since they could walk. The strength of Wilde’s Irish connections have been a revelation to him.
“I mean, he adopted that [posh] accent when he went to Oxford. Apparently he was two days in Oxford and he got teased about being Irish and he just [dropped it].” Given how personal De Profundis is, Rea may perform it in the voice of that earlier Wilde. “I haven’t really solved that.”
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Rea’s Northern Irish accent has been a point of pride — and contention — throughout his career. Unless he was playing an English character, he didn’t want to use an English accent. He didn’t accept English as “neutral”. A casting director at London’s National Theatre said if he wouldn’t change his accent, he couldn’t do Shakespeare. “Even though I speak Hiberno-English, which is Elizabethan English,” he sighs. “That’s what drives me absolutely insane.”
Recently he adopted an English drawl when playing a Russian prince in the BBC adaptation of War and Peace. “Because that was the rule: the Russian characters would have English accents, the French characters would speak in broken French. That just seemed crazy to me,” he says wearily. “I find it very strange and I didn’t fight about it — because I usually do.”
Irish nationalism is a subject that has irked Rea in previous interviews — partly, one imagines, because of the media interest in his ex-wife Dolours Price, who was imprisoned for an IRA bombing before marrying and having children with Rea. Price died four years ago. But it doesn’t seem too great a leap to view his reluctance to adopt the English brogue as linked to nationalism.
Rea says it was more of a personal choice. “I felt that I got robbed of something. There was a snobbery against this in the English theatre, where everyone was going on about how [actor] Albert Finney and all these guys had changed it, and it was all working class. It wasn’t. I was told by [theatre director] Peter Hall ‘change your accent’. Why should I pretend I’m English before I can pretend I’m Russian?
“I should have been more subtle about it. I should have been cleverer, but Northern people do tend to make a meal of their gestures. It wasn’t just nationalist, it was personal. And I still feel comfortable with how I express myself in my own accent. But in The End of the Affair with Neil [Jordan], I played an English civil servant. Why would I do it in a Belfast accent? He’s not from Belfast.” Rea himself was born in Belfast to parents who were Protestant on paper but who never saw the inside of a church except for a funeral. Even then he remembers his father attending a Catholic funeral. His father was a cross-community drinker.
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“Some people in the north behaved very well with both groups. But officially it’s a nightmare when you see what’s going on now with crocodiles and everything,” says Rea, straying into contemporary politics — namely DUP leader Arlene Foster’s recent retort to Sinn Fein about how “if you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back and looking for more”.
“F*** her,” mumbles Rea. “She pushed it right back to [former Northern Irish prime minister] Brookeborough, right back to ‘wouldn’t have a Catholic about the place’ — that’s what Brookeborough said. It’s an outrage and she hasn’t apologised.”
Rea wasn’t baptised in any religion. “I suppose I went to a state school where they said the long version of the Our Father,” he says, referring to the Protestant version. “Of course if you say you’ve no religion, they assume you’re a Protestant, don’t they? I resent the assumption of opinions and positions that I actually don’t have.” These days he might go into a church when travelling abroad, or light a candle if he’s worried about his sons, but he still considers himself of no religion.
Rea studied English at Queen’s University Belfast and trained as an actor at the Abbey before moving to the London stage. He returned to the north to found Field Day theatre company with playwright Brian Friel in 1980.
“There’s a choice in what I do,” says the 70-year-old. “I played leading roles in London in the Seventies and then I started my own company. That was all deeply considered. I didn’t just stumble around. When I was doing those leading roles in London I was thinking all the time, ‘Soon I’ll go home and do my own, when I know as much as I feel I need to know’.
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“I’d be at the English National theatre but they asked me to do Playboy of the Western World. I didn’t see how I was going to be able to do that anywhere else; and I felt I was working for Peter Hall; it was his country, it was his agenda. I had my own agenda which was to do with saying something about the ghastly north.”
“Why should I pretend I’m English before I can pretend I’m Russian?
Friel and Rea founded Field Day as a way of affecting people’s ideas. They premiered great plays such as Friel’s Translations in a time of hunger strikes, bombing and “serious futility”. Though Field Day still exists and Rea plans to do something big in Derry for its 40th anniversary, the company’s heyday came to an end when Friel gave Dancing at Lughnasa to the Abbey instead of Field Day. “I don’t want to say bad things because I loved him dearly,” Rea says of the playwright. “It’s just I think if we’d done another great play by him, we would have moved up into another level, but that’s the way it goes. We did 10 years of incredible stuff around the country.”
Rea, who lives in Dublin, had been starring in films since Neil Jordan cast him in Angel (1982) but true stardom came with The Crying Game (1992), which earned him an Oscar nomination. Given that Rea seems a reluctant celebrity, does he ever wish his career hadn’t been as successful? “No. I wish I had done better,” he laughs. “I am reluctant because I have been interviewed and people have said things I’ve found distasteful, and I don’t particularly like my thoughts being processed through another person.”
And yet, Rea is great company. He laughs a lot and is happy to chat. He mocks himself for giving “I have a nice garden” as an answer to what he does when he’s not working. Another answer is: “Go mad”. “That’s what my boys say. They see me walking around and they say, ‘get him a job!’”. He even musters up humour when I badger him about whether or not he is a nationalist.
“Is this a court of law?” he says. “Listen, I’ve got an Irish passport, I’ve always had an Irish passport, long before Brexit, long before the EU even. I am an Irishman.” I’ll move on. “That’s okay,” he continues. “I mean Irish nationalism was a response to English nationalism. We didn’t have a concept of a nation until Hugh O’Neill [in the 16th century], and so narrow Irish nationalism is very irritating to me but I absolutely believe there should be a united Ireland. In fact a majority voted to stay in the European Union in the north and that is being ignored.”
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He explains he wasn’t “hired” to provide Gerry Adams’s voice during the broadcasting ban during the Troubles. He did it because Mary Holland, a journalist and friend, asked him to. “She said, ‘look I’ve done an interview with Gerry Adams and I’m hearing something different coming from Sinn Fein, I’m hearing a relaxing of positions. People have to hear what they’re saying, and if they don’t the moment will pass.’ She was appealing to me to help her.” Holland also said they might get into trouble, which sealed the deal.
As Rea heads off to meet Jordan for dinner, he offers a different view on nationality. “Actors are like a separate species, a separate nationality. Could I say I was not the same nationality as guys I know in London or America? We’re the same people,” he says. “I think it’s more fundamental than anything, that desire to act. You just want to laugh all the time.” And Rea does a lot of that.
De Profundis is part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival, which runs from August 11-20; kilkennyarts.ie