From washing dishes to applying for work with the RSC, Derbhle Crotty spanned the gap in a few hours. Now back in Dublin after six years in London, she talks to Patricia Deevy about her flood of work after periods of idleness and the life choices which are imminent
A few years ago Derbhle Crotty changed the spelling of her first name. The ‘bh’ which might have tripped British casting directors became a ‘v’.
“It was a ridiculous thing to do and I’ve changed it back. A moment of impotence and so stupid. I just hadn’t been seen for anything in months and I hadn’t worked in months and I panicked and I thought: ‘Maybe that’ll get me noticed’, which is absurd.
“Sometimes you consider making those sort of cosmetic changes. You think: ‘If I bought myself a whole new wardrobe’ if you could afford it or: ‘If I went to such a place’. But really, it is such a game of chance.”
It’s hard to credit that so gifted an actor, at once raw, bold and controlled, could go months without work but that’s acting. After six years in London, she returned to Ireland in October and, for now, work is flowing.
Currently appearing as sharp-tongued but wistful thirtysomething Jane, in Christian O’Reilly’s first full length play The Good Father at Druid, she will follow it as the scheming and wicked aunt, Mena, in John B Keane’s Sive, also at Druid, and then she’s due to appear in an Abbey production of The Plough and the Stars.
The first of these is a warm two-hander about an uneasy man and an edgy woman who have a fateful meeting at a New Year’s Eve party. It is a change from the weighty roles (Portia, Portia Coughlan, Ophelia, Pegeen Mike) and weighty names (Ibsen, Gorky, Strindberg) which fill her CV. She thinks that what the new work shares with her other roles is its sophistication.
“There’s great complexity in the decisions that she [Jane] has to make. I think that in contemporary plays the characters are as complex [as in classical drama].
“She says: ‘I want everything to be great. I want to be in love and I want to have a family and I want my father to give me away and I want my parents to be proud.’ It’s the temptation of a modern life that all of that can either be bought or achieved through reading the right books or cooking the right food or observing a certain lifestyle. The play sets it up as if they are acceptable ambitions in a life, that it’s an acceptable ambition to buy into a formula, and it explodes that.”
Tall, statuesque, with thick coils of wild black hair, Crotty is friendly she arrives waving paper cups of hot coffee and calling me Teresa (because, she reckons, she once appeared in Teresa Deevy’s Katie Roche) and articulate and skilled at keeping talk more general than personal. The woman of stage torments is hard to conjure; but the determined intelligence which creates her is clear.
Crotty returned to Dublin to work with Jane Brennan and Pauline Flanagan in Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire. “I felt I had to make a decision [about] where I was going to put my roots down. Having said that, in two years time I might change and go somewhere else.
“I hope that I can have a career there [Britain] and here, although I have to say I was there for six years and I didn’t do anything at home. I suppose they’re, in practice, mutually exclusive and I absolutely don’t think they should be.”
She went over as Portia Coughlan because it was an Abbey/Royal Court co-production. Afterwards, she got an 18-month contract with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In between she worked in a restaurant. “I was washing dishes the day I went for the RSC job. I could still smell the Marigolds off my hands going in and now I’m talking to Adrian Noble [the company’s director] about what I think the RSC should be doing.”
Nevertheless, with a CV like hers she cannot but consider herself successful.
“I work, put it that way.”
Crotty is determined to work. At an awards dinner in London she met a well-known actress who is a little less visible now that she’s reached her late 40s. “I suppose I was in pretty Bolshie form and I said to her: ‘What do you do when you’re not working?’ And she said: ‘I like to paint.’ I said: ‘No, what do you do? Do you go out? Do you try to create new relationships with new directors?’
“She wasn’t outraged but she was agog that anyone would actually pursue it in such a literal way. And there is a gentlewoman’s agreement sometimes among a certain class of actor that it runs counter to the art of being an actor to talk about money or to hustle or even to consider it as a conversational gambit. So I didn’t get a straight answer from her and I still ask that question.”
She appeared with Damian Band of Brothers Lewis in an RSC production of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf. Other London colleagues, people such as Jennifer Ehle and Patricia Hodge, have steady TV careers. Her line is “if it happens, it happens”.
“I think largely you have to surrender to chance and you have to accept that there are certain things that you can do that make you more attractive to film directors.”
Such as?
“There is the cliche of ‘maintenance’ – physical maintenance. If you neglect that, well, you’re going a certain way.”
Character acting?
“There’s much worse things to be. I think character [roles] are where you really want to be going anyway.”
So what did she do when she wasn’t working for months work out?
She makes a face.
“You have to, but I don’t. Do some yoga and do some swimming and stuff like that.”
Network?
“Yeah. Something I find very refreshing about Ireland is that here is free exchange between directors, designers, writers, actors. For example, I was six years working [in the UK] and I don’t think I ever came in contact with a living writer. Whereas here they’re someone you’ll have a drink with and you’ll talk about theatre and you’ll talk about everything and anything. It’s not that there’s a village atmosphere here, but we acknowledge each other and nobody sees fit to corral us.”
So that was part of coming back?
“Yes, definitely. A sense that you were working in a more integral way.”
Even before Crotty had registered for her law degree at UCD in 1986, she had joined Trinity’s Players. “I didn’t get cast in the freshers’ show, though I did make-up. And then I realised, and it’s shameful really, that there was a drama society in UCD.”
Contrary to what you might suspect, she hadn’t arrived from Cavan town set on being an actor, with her formal studies merely a backdrop. She is the eldest of four. Her father is a retired primary school teacher and there was no precedent for acting in her circle. She didn’t get it how people became actors. “I just imagined that if your dad was an actor that was something you might go into.”
She appeared in school productions, debated for the school team, studied diligently (“It’s your passport on to something else, so you’re working with a purpose,” she says, when I suggest that she was a bit of a model teen) and went to college fully intending to be a lawyer.
“[I had] a genuine interest in the legal process and in equality. I was a very idealistic law student which maybe didn’t cut me out for it. Coming to the end of it I felt that that wasn’t specifically for me. I think if you really apply yourself you can become creative in it but I was impatient for something.”
She signed up for a performance diploma at Trinity’s Samuel Beckett Centre. It wasn’t as if the legal or corporate worlds were beckoning; the early Nineties was still a time of recession. “It was a little bit easier for me to make that choice at that time because it wasn’t starting on 40K. I would consider myself lucky.”
She likes David Mamet’s description of acting as a blue-collar job. “It’s bricks and mortar and skills. You’re an artisan.”
As opposed to an intellectual or an entertainer or a celebrity?
“No, I think you observe the nuts and bolts, you ask what is happening, the basic thing: what do I want to achieve.”
Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan showed Crotty as a master craftswoman. It was the story of a young midlands woman whose twin brother committed suicide on their 15th birthday and who has been a ragged, tormented and doomed soul ever since.
“It’s about a woman struggling to keep her head above water, as opposed to about a woman who drowns. It’s not necessarily a particularly Irish thing, but it’s something I connect with my Irishness, is that sense of longing.
“I guess it comes possibly from a background of poverty, alienation,looking somewhere else for your salvation but wishing that you could stay in the place that you are. There’s always another day in which things might be better. There’s always what’s around the corner.”
How the Irish personality works itself out in Crotty is in her living in the future. “It’s where do you go next, how much to leave to chance, what to prioritise. Is it time to travel now? I would like to direct, I would like to explore lots of different ways of expressing myself. So you never actually get to a place where you say: ‘Now I’ve made it’ or ‘Now that’s enough and now all I need to do is maintain that.’ You’re always pushing further.”
A woman friend, a professional, recently told her the glass ceiling was almost a thing of the past in business. Instead, life gets in the way. Women hit the mid-30s and reconsider their lives.
“Suddenly there’s a new urgency about possibly raising a family and you have to answer a question that is much bigger than your CAO form or your choice of college or anything like that. We should be looking at ways which accept that life changes all of the time, that your choices are different and that you may want to speed up or slow down in terms of career. I think we’re becoming more trapped because we’re taking for granted certain material things that we see as necessary in our lives to enable us to make those decisions.”
So, about directing?
“I could be so full of hot air?” she says, with a laugh.
And about starting a family with her (non-theatrical) partner?
“That’s becoming an imminent choice, really. I suppose like anything you sort of feel: ‘Get on with it, give it a go’. You try to create the ideal circumstances and I think you have to throw your hands up and accept that your life is chaotic anyway and it will be even more so.”
‘The Good Father’ continues at Druid until August 10. Tickets 091-568 617 (Druid) or, until next Sunday, 091-566 577 (Galway Arts Festival). ‘Sive’ runs for two weeks from Sept 6. Tickets from Druid.